Pitchfork

Usually when Beck thinks he's fallen in love, he either waxes goofily sentimental, ignoring his eclectic tastes and pulling out the acoustic, or crushes his love in an onslaught of samples, drum beats, and arcane lyrics, vulcanizing any gooey pathos into rock-solid white-boy freakout. Now when Beck sings about thinking he's in love, that's a different animal.

Sure, Nigel Godrich works behind the boards on this one-- which popped up on YouTube earlier this week and vanished just as quickly-- but he adds little cachet to what's practically a Guero B-side. Beck sounds as emotionally distant crooning about love here as he did on most of that album, which would be fine if the instrumentation didn't sound so aloof as well. I didn't buy the accusations surrounding Beck's self-nostalgia on Guero, never held him guilty of lazily trying to revisit his un-revisitable golden period or anything psychological like that. However, this tune's fence-straddling, half-assed funkiness-- while adhering to conventional rock songwriting rules-- concerns me about Beck's creative mojo. Compared to his past works, it's like he's taking a Rorschach test and his best reply is always "I see ink splattered on paper."