This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
At first, he was just a Loser getting crazy with the Cheez Whiz. Then he got a Devil’s Haircut, two turntables and a microphone and figured out Where It’s At. But now, Beck Hansen has grown up. He’s matured. And he has a far more important goal: He wants to freak you all night long.
Not in so many words, perhaps — but that’s definitely the body language that this Angelino hip-hop folkie is putting out there on Midnite Vultures, his sixth album (counting indie releases) and the “official” followup to his 1996 smash Odelay. That’s as opposed to last year’s “unofficial” followup Mutations, with its folky numbers, downbeat vibe and emphasis on musical performances instead of studio constructs.
Much of Midnite Vultures, by contrast, is closer to vintage Beck: The kooky pop pastiches, the stream-of-consciousness lyrics, the shag carpet and glitter-ball disco vibe, the all-knowing smirk, the pop-and-lock dance beats. But I wasn’t kidding when I said he’s matured. This disc doesn’t suffer nearly as much from the ADD vibe that defined (or, if you’re not a fan, plagued) his earlier albums. On several of these tracks, Beck sustains a single, soulful groove for an entire number. Even when he does jump from style to style — like on Sexx Laws, which leaps from ’60s go-go funk with punchy R&B horns into a backwoods banjo-and-pedal-steel progression — what seems like madness turns out to be brilliantly methodical when Beck ends up layering the two genres together into a weird new hybrid.
Ditto the lyrics; they’re still freaky, but not randomly so. On Nicotine & Gravy, he uses words like building blocks to create a specific mood of a wartorn landscape; on Hlwd. Freaks, he constructs a full-blown sendup of West Coast hip-hop, complete with blunted homeboy delivery and references to party people, Hyundais and “hot sex in back rows.”
Which reminds me: I also wasn’t kidding about that freak-you-all-night thang. “I wanna defy the logic of all sex laws,” he declares in the opening cut — and damned if this white boy doesn’t give it his best shot for the next 50 minutes, inviting us all for a cruise on “the good ship menage a trois” and promising to “leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed.” Yow!
If it reminds you of Prince, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Several of Midnite Vultures’ sultry vibes lock into a slinky, Revolution-era groove, with Beck trying the Purple One’s sleazy falsetto on for size. It all comes together once and for all on the surreal closing track Debra — a wild, five-minute R&B slow jam worthy of Prince himself, with Beck howling, yowling and faking it so real he’s beyond fake.
Which is another way of saying he’s still getting crazy with the Cheez Whiz.
