Beats brighten Beck's lyrics on 'Modern Guilt'

Back in the

Odelay

day, Beck was a carefree sort. Or at least it seemed so, given the gleeful inventiveness of the boy wonder of cut-and-paste postmodern pop.

In 1996, he was proving he was no one-hit "Loser" with his second major-label album (which was reissued this year). He had two turntables and a microphone at the ready, a "Devil's Haircut" in his mind, and the zeitgeist in the palm of his hand.

A dozen years later, Beck has come down with a case of the paranoid post-millennial alienation blues. Or maybe it's just a premature midlife crisis. (The towheaded rocker turns 38 today.) Beck, whose full name is Beck Hansen, is feeling both "Youthless" and rootless.

The opening line of the first song on his album Modern Guilt (DGC ***), out today, is "I think I'm stranded, but I don't know where," on a song called "Orphans." On the album's trippy first single, "Chemtrails," guitars swirl and Joey Waronker pounds out Keith Moon drum rolls while the singer struggles to not be "swallowed by evil." The bouncy title cut finds Beck confessing: "I feel uptight when I walk in the city / I feel so cold when I'm at home."

Sounds like a bummer, eh? Not to worry, never fear: Along with Beck, Danger Mouse - a.k.a. producer-of-the-moment Brian Burton - is here.

While he's rarely been at a loss for musical ideas, Beck has been at his best when collaborating with producers who can shape his experimental notions into a cohesive whole. The Dust Brothers, for instance, helmed Odelay, and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich assisted with the down-tempo Mutations (1998) and Sea Change (2002). The latter is a breakup album with a seriousness born of personal crisis, in contrast to the spiritual malaise of Modern Guilt.

For Modern Guilt, that role is played with panache by Burton, whose resume includes the Damon Albarn projects Gorillaz and the Good, the Bad & the Queen, blues tandem the Black Keys, and the duo Gnarls Barkley, which he leads with Cee-Lo Green.

With Burton providing "beats" and "sounds," Modern Guilt isn't nearly so distressing a listen as its lyric sheet might lead you to believe. The producer, who made his name mashing up Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' White Album, is expert at turning the troubling concerns of his collaborators into glitchy pop nuggets that entice the ear as they worry the mind.

"Gamma Ray" is a bopping jolt of surf-rock, a close relative of "Gone Daddy Gone," the Violent Femmes cover that can be found on Gnarls' St. Elsewhere. "Soul of a Man" is Beck's spin on bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, and it kicks up a riff-rock dust storm: "Call a doctor, call a ghost / Put a fire in your bones."

And with "Replica," Beck and Burton fashion a bookend to Odelay's Marcel Duchamp-inspired "Readymade," blending acoustic instruments with skittering techno, while seeking refuge in a made-up mirror-image existence that's free of the anxieties of the modern world.

Modern Guilt's 10 tightly constructed tunes clock in at under 34 minutes. In that sense, it's an antidote to information-age overkill.

The prankster whose last tour included puppets that aped the band hasn't lost his playfulness. "I need a teleprompter for my life," had me guffawing, anyway. But the humor is black. And when Beck decides that he's not suicidal enough to actually to leap into the fiery "womb of the world," on the string-infused closer "Volcano," that glimmer of hopefulness is interrupted as the album comes to an abrupt, unexpected halt. All Modern Guilt leaves us with is uncertainty.

nolead begins Willie Nelson
& Wynton Marsalis
nolead ends nolead begins Two Men With the Blues
nolead ends nolead begins (Blue Note ***1/2)

nolead ends

"Uptight" is not a word one would associate with Willie Nelson.

Wynton Marsalis, on the other hand, is widely perceived, unfairly or not, as being a jazz commissar whose playing is ruled by a buttoned-down exactitude that, while impressive in its scholarship, is overly confining in its formal adherence to tradition.

But you can't hang with Willie without loosening up.

Two Men With the Blues is an inspired if - on the surface - unlikely pairing that brings together Southern gentlemen of two different stripes. Recorded live in 2007, with a small combo that features longtime Nelson harmonica player Mickey Raphael and members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, it's a casual collaboration that finds its feet down in Marsalis' native New Orleans on "Basin Street Blues."

Nelson's singing, on a tender "Georgia on My Mind," playful "Caldonia," and his own wistful "Night Life," is, as always, half-spoken, occasionally meandering and spot-on. And Marsalis' trumpet is startlingly warm and rugged, as he paints the town blue on "Bright Lights, Big City" and everywhere shows that, given the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and blow, he can play with deep feeling as well as precision.