Beck must be one of very few people (Isaac Hayes being another) so hip he gets away with being a Scientologist. Sadly, he is not cool enough to undergo the remix treatment and come away untarnished.
Billed as the companion to his recent Guero album, Guerolito drains the original record of all its sunny funk energy and replaces it with a dreary bleep-fest. Saving graces include Air’s Heaven Hammer, a typically kitsch affair, complete with cowbells and church organs; Board of Canada’s woozy redux of Broken Drum; and the producer-du-jour Diplo’s bass- heavy dancefloor filler Wish Coin, which uses the Beat’s Twist and Crawl as its backbone. The rest sadly seem to want to turn Beck into Eels on downers.
File under “the acceptable face of come-down music” — for people who are too old to be doing club drugs but are still doing them anyway. “My head is killing me, I really shouldn’t have done that third pill last night when I’ve got the kids this weekend. Put on Guerolito, will you.”
(Interscope)