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Sometimes when a producer begins to get legs under him and gets known as an “it” producer, anyone paying attention knows that the paths of the individual in question and a particular musician will cross. It’s a foregone conclusion; they’re destined to work together because they’re cut from the same musical cloth and their established previous patterns would mesh well together. For example, when Danger Mouse crowned his string of successes (Gorillaz’ Demon Days, The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple) with The Black Keys’ Attack And Release, all roads seemed to point to a collaboration with Beck. Amazingly, it happened in shorter order than anyone could have imagined.

Given that, of the pair, Danger Mouse has been more consistent that Beck in recent years(the singer has genre and style jumped so often in his career that he has earned the reputation of being a wild card in this hand), the onus falls to the singer to carry this endeavor off. If his song writing and mindset are in the right places, Modern Guilt could rival Odelay for ‘definitive work’ status; if not, the album could do irreparable damage to the singer’s career.

Happily though, it all works out marvelously on Modern Guilt – even if, in a lot of cases, the songs sound like they’re leftovers from 2006’s The Information.

“Orphans” opens the record with a modest re-envisioning of the “Think I’m In Love” aesthetic and is possessed of the sweetest vocal melody that has ever escaped Beck’s lips and is made all the more romantic with the understated harmony from Cat Power's Chan Marshall that sets the re-assuring tone for the album and, from there, the retread (but not really in a bad way) begins. Beck dusts off some old ‘cocktail/lounge/dance’ pastiche numbers in “Gamma Ray,” the title track and “Walls” that are all good plays to the singer’s recent strengths, but where Modern Guilt shines is in the new coats of paint that both singer and producer use to dress up the later half of the record.

With a healthy dose of nervous energy, Danger Mouse turns “Soul of A Man” – what could have simply been a throwback to One Foot In The Grave in lesser hands – into a stomping slab of well-produced no wave that will instantly get old school fans excited while making newer fans dance. The result is somehow instantly relieving – like you`ve been holding your breath so long that you`ve forgotten how to breathe – and from there Beck seems to recapture some sort of energy that vanished almost without people noticing right around the release of Mutations.

It isn`t so much that Beck is trying to move forward with Modern Guilt as it is that he’s re-examining what he’s done before and let Danger Mouse loose on the material to finally clean up the loose ends one a series of records with something noticeably lacking even if listeners couldn’t qualify exactly what it was. Songs like “Profanity Prayers,” “Volcano” and “Chemtrails” all go back and re-examine the singer’s time spent in the underground (read: pre-”Loser”) and turns the sleepy, mid-tempo numbers that were once the forgettable moments back then into the most spectacular and compelling tracks on this album.

It might be wishful thinking to assume that Modern Guilt is anything more than a desperate attempt to re-invigorate Beck (the singer has done material like this before after all, before shooting off out of the known stratosphere; so Modern Guilt may amount to nothing more than the safe play in the greand scheme of things), but this album does have the stray sparks of excitement that have been absent from the singer`s work for a while. Danger Mouse might be responsible for those (it`s difficult to tell because the duo does work well together) and, if that`s the case, we can only hope that the pair cross paths again because, after such a lengthy `perfectly average` spell, this is the best its been.

Artist:
www.modernguilt.com 
myspace.com/beck

Album:
Modern Guilt is out now. Buy it on Amazon.