metric reflection

PotD – 1/26/10

Fish market Fruit

Ah, another day of reading not quite concluded. Measurement of identity today. Good stuff, but no new research ideas. The funniest thing I’ve read all day, however, is this guideline for Beckites and Tea Partiers explaining the folly and lack of self-interest in their protests.

On the other hand, great music came out today. I’ll focus on some of these as the week continues, but today I’ll look at Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM. Here’s the video for Heaven Can Wait, the first single off her new album:

Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of long-time crooner Serge Gainsbourg, sort of a French version of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Leonard Cohen. She hasn’t had much success in the U.S., as far as I know (though she gained some traction with her last album). But in this case, she teamed up with Beck, he of “Loser”, “Jackass” and “Tropicana” (and many, many better tunes), who produced and co-wrote the album.

His influence shows on this song, which is definitely far poppier than the rest of the album. This song has the percussive emphasis of some of Beck’s early work (I like to call it the drummy side of Beck) mixed in with a decent tune and some nice horn touches.

But the rest of the album is really intriguing insofar as it offers a new direction for Beck’s future work. See, Beck basically has two sides: the drummy side of early albums and 2008′s Modern Guilt, and the folksy side of Sea Change and Mutations. See the difference:

and:

Not sure what I like better, but that’s beside the point. I think this album, for the most part, is reminiscent of a stripped down version of a mid-00′s Air album. Those albums were spacy and futuristic, a 2000s musical version of the 60s fantasies of the future. (Being from the 2000s, of course, they were much darker than anything the 60s would have conjured.) But this album, as I said above, is a stripped down version of this. It’s still spacy, but it subtracts the airy, atmospheric elements of Talkie Walkie. This points to a potentially interesting new direction for Beck.