Beck

Brooklyn IT bands come and go like a mid-morning sugar high, leaving you jittery and confused. And so many of them fall back on the same record-collector talking points: My Bloody Valentine, the Shangri-Las, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Phil Spector, Nuggets garage rock. But not all of them do it as well as the Vivian Girls (yes, that’s a reference to Henry Darger’s 15,245-page novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls). Cassie Ramone, Kickball Katy and Ali Koehler—as they lovingly refer to themselves—pump out waves of delicious girl-group pop curdled with frantic guitars and mile-high reverb. Three-chord vamps like “Tell the World” and “Such a Joke” sound like they were recorded in an aluminum shack, the girls’ deadpan harmonies bouncing endlessly off the walls.  read more »

It's a perfect match, really. An artist who's made a career out of refashioning musical kitsch to his own inscrutable ends plays a venue refashioned out of a massive, gold-encrusted, Art-Deco movie-palace and former televangelism center in Washington Heights. It's Beck at the United Palace Theatre!

The pop mystic seems to be out of a record deal as his latest album, Modern Guilt, concludes his contract with DGC Records. Of course, Beck is totally chill about it. "I haven't bothered to plan anything," he told the Times Dave Itzkoff earlier this month. "I don't know where the record business is going to be in six months.  read more »

Why should anyone care about Beck? Isn’t he just some 90's holdover gone morose, gone Scientologist, gone lame with the weight of his early successes and the death of irony, that vein he mined so long and so well?

His last two releases, the aimless Guero and the overworked yet hollow The Information were critically shrugged at and popularly buoyed by the artist’s (deserved) reputation, but seemed to have found Beck Hansen short on good ideas or good energy, something for which he was never, ever lacking.

Yet the father of two is nearing 40, at the tail end of his recording contract, undetermined as to his future, and like the rest of us looking at the abyss that is the future of music.  read more »