No noodling

Typical Beck: the follow-up to his multi-platinum (and "Zeitgeist defining" if you read the wrong people) Odelay album isn't a follow-up at all - it's what he describes as a "parenthetical" work. Basically, he has a clause in his contract with his record company which allows him to release his more self-indulgent creations (of which there are many) on his own indie label, the quaintly-titled Bong Load Custom Records. What happened here was that when his major label owners (Geffen) heard the quality of his new record, titled Mutations, they wanted it for their own label. Fuss and nonsense maybe, but what do you expect from someone who's been erroneously saddled with the label of This Year's Model?

I remain absolutely unconvinced about the merits of Odelay. The whole vibe about the album was that it was eclectic and therefore necessarily good (how often people fall for that one, as we all know too well!). The very fact that Beck could mix and match hip hop/folk/indie guitars was deemed to be a very wondrous thing indeed but Odelay was in fact a mediocre work, lacking any real musical worth and only working on a superficial, idiosyncratic level. Combining styles and mutating genres is all well and good, but is not an end in itself and excites only people who are told what to be excited by and/or are too busy staring at the surface to notice any content.

If I want hip-hop/rap I'll get my Wu Tang Clan records out, if I want folk/ country I'll listen to Wilco and Galaxie 500 and if I want guitars I'll get Hole or The Pumpkins. A distillation involving all three is as awkward and clumsy as an average Beck record. In his own little way, Beck is as much of a rock 'n' roll swindle as The Beastie Boys, those other Face-magazine-endorsed purveyors of all that is repetitive and derivative but masquerading as "contemporary" and "cutting edge". There's always something more than a bit sad about a bunch of middle-class white boys from arty/liberal backgrounds appropriating aspects of a culture they've only come in contact with largely through watching television. The Beastie Boys are to hip-hop/rap what Joe Bugner was to boxing. It all goes into the realm of the ludicrous when you add lashings of hypocrisy to the mix: sharing a stage with The Prodigy earlier this year, our heroes rang Liam Howlett before the show, requesting that he wouldn't play the song Smack My Bitch Up as it was in their own pseudo-bohemian minds offensive to women. This from a band who used to have naked women dancing in cages during their concert tours - or maybe that was just their own, ironic re-working of how more than 51 per cent of the world's population is wantonly degraded for the sake of the other 49 per cent.

Back to Beck and the new album: Mutations is a distinct improvement on Odelay mainly because he's spared us the sampling and the incessant noodling about with technology. The key term to be looking out for in the avalanche of reviews of this album is "stripped down", in that when the album really works it is reminiscent of Lambchop or the mandolin-era REM.

Less is always more when it comes to Beck, except you just know he's going to spoil it all by doing his bad George-Clinton-meets-Phil-Ochs impression on his parenthetical-less, official follow-up.

Mutations by Beck is reviewed on this page. It is on the Geffen label

Sad to hear Limerick's Zeric recording studios has bitten the dust (they have been turned into an office block or something like that) but at least they leave us with something good with a three-track release from a very interesting local band called The Radars. There's a sort of an Irish Portishead feel to the songs but with bits of drum 'n' bass in there as well - and while they've miles to go, they're a very promising dance act. The Radars will be doing a Fanning session on November 20th and launching the new EP at Limerick's Savoy on the 26th . . .

Bob Marley tribute band Buffalo Soldier are now known as Buffalo Souljah - that should clear up all the massive confusion out there . . .

Good ol' David Gray returns with a new album, the self-financed White Ladder and a pretty comprehensive nationwide tour in December, including (and this is a new one to me) a tour-within-a-tour in Dublin where he plays Whelans, The Music Centre and Vicar Street in the space of three days . . .

More ill-mannered musings next week.

The email address for Sleeve Notes is sleevenotes@irish-times.ie