Track Listing:

1. Orphans
2. Gamma Ray
3. Chemtrails
4. Modern Guilt
5. Youthless
6. Walls
7. Replica
8. Soul of a Man
9. Profanity Prayers
10. Volcano

Image credited to: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/Beck_-_Modern_Guilt.jpg

Beck has always been a stickler for meaningful expression.  He transports whatever is in his head into some sort of musical creation that manages to transcend the scope of the four-piece conventional rock band.  His libretto has always been filled with intrigue, while the music seems almost systematically unorthodox.  Simplicity has never been Beck’s strong suit; endless mixes, loops, samples, and other jinks resultant from furious amounts of production, along with lyrics that seem to say nothing at first sight and a maddeningly eclectic, almost inconsistent spectrum of sounds – these are the things the Beck has endlessly meddled, and brilliantly succeeded, with.  And so we see Modern Guilt, Beck’s latest work, and end up with an ever-so-slight frown.  Why?

The curtains are raised with a rather orthodox rocker by the name of “Orphans,” a song that almost gently plods to the sound of a simple drum beat – “And the rain it comes and floods our lungs / We’re just orphans in a tidal wave’s wake.”  Serious much?  This sombre nature continues into the grave “Gamma Ray,” which continuously ponders upon the consequences of our world’s environmental predicament.  Modern Guilt’s first single, the semi-epic “Chemtrails,” attempts to forcefully combine Kid A and crashing drums and cymbals – and thus attempts to amalgamate his own sense of prodigious originality with its polar opposite, simplicity.  While Beck is a tremendous musician in his own right, my first complaint with it is that I can’t hear, not to mention decipher, the damn lyrics with thunderclouds of drums crashing left, right, and centre  (And you probably know that I have other complaints – better ones.)!

Modern Guilt ends up being a showcase of Beck’s versatility.  He can play something conventional and simplistic.  What a revelation!  However, Beck’s magnum opus, the magnificent Odelay, provides us with the arousal of our curiosities and the quasi-discordance of multitudes of different genres and different sounds.  A hard rocker like “Devil’s Haircut,” an experimental piece of art like “High 5 (Rock the Catskills),” and “Loser” 2.0 – “Where It’s At” – such material is what Beck shines brightly with.  It would be downright pathetic for Modern Guilt to imitate the methods of Odelay, but it’d be better seeing Beck play to his strengths.

That’s not to say that Modern Guilt sounds like utter shit; nothing could be further than the truth.  The personal overtures that Beck undertakes on the album are quite genuine.  Take the closer, “Volcano,” for example, which provides us with personal-ubiquitous, yet genuine lyrics like “I’m tired of people / who only want / to be pleased / but I still want / to please you.”  At least there is much meaning and honesty behind Beck’s latest venture in his nomadic musical career.

FINAL RATING: B+

Track Listing:

1. Closer
2. Crawl
3. Sex on Fire
4. Use Somebody
5. Manhattan
6. Revelry
7. 17
8. Notion
9. I Want You
10. Be Somebody
11. Cold Desert

Image credited to: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/34/OBTNUS.jpg

2008 has been long buried in the continuous wavelengths of time, and yet I sit here reviewing Only by the Night, an album released in September last year, even before my first review!  Come to think of it, the first album that I reviewed was Coldplay’s awkward breakthrough work, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.  However, as cumbersome as it is, Viva la Vida is one work Kings of Leon can only look towards this work as an example.  Now, why would that be?

Kings of Leon has been showered with praise and popularity of late.  They’ve scraped a Grammy, they’ve topped charts in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand (and came somewhat close to topping in the US too), and they’ve earned quite a bit of money and fame in the process.  However, it goes without saying that a Grammy-winning, chart-topping piece of work can turn out to be quite grossly unimaginative; and Kings of Leon seems to have no inspiration towards music than to win people’s minds through manipulating their most acclimatised interests.  And that’s completely and utterly fine – fine, that is, if and only if the music actually turns out to be something worth listening to, something productive.  Only by the Night has turned out to be one huge stab at attempting to sound as alternative as possible.

Kings of Leon offers no musical complexity, no unusual lyrics, and not even a single attempt to get out of the norm of the rock industry – even if the norm doesn’t quite coincide with their comfort zones.  Indeed, some of Kings of Leon’s work on this album sounds painful to listen for a second time, and it is even more agonising to extract such work out of my memory.  A title like “Sex on Fire” gives a less-than-satisfactory first impression: just a case of run-in-the-mill Nickelback-esque rock n’ roll attitude that critics, including I, adore to demolish.

Such first impressions worsen when one examines the Followill brothers’ lyrical musings.  Caleb croons in “Sex on Fire:” “Hot as a fever, rattling bones / I could just taste it, taste it / If it’s not forever, if it’s just tonight / Oh, it’s still the greatest …”  It’s as if the guy has no sense of imagination to see past their most primary, lustful desires.  According to their lyrics, there is no higher order, no more elevated sense of meaning or value, other than anything as superficial as sex.  Followill confirms this great undoing of theirs in various instances.  Take “17″ for example: “I could call you baby, I could call you, damn it / … It’s the rolling of her Spanish tongue / that made me want to stay.”  How about Caleb’s caterwauls in “Revelry:” “So I drink and smoke and I ask you if you’re ever around”?  Such lyrics give the impression that Kings of Leon want to humiliate themselves with the most poetic of superficial anecdotes – the very genre of lyrical writing that doesn’t want to be decorated with artistic license.

At least the lyrics suit the abysmal sounds that the album provides us.  Only by the Night incorporates the usual riffs and chords strummed on electric guitars, a bass, drums, and quite a terrible-sounding vocalist.  Sure, there are the odd instances when a few notes are played on a keyboard, but I can only wonder – how on Earth has music transcended even the lowermost echelons of Hell to celebrate even this grotesquely stereotypical piece of work with a Grammy?  I can only wonder.

FINAL RATING: D+