The Post-Rockist

In an era when music critics trash albums simply because they sound like the artist’s previous album, I think that we need to be able to recognize that when something’s done right, it bears repeating. For example, the severest criticism I’ve heard of Interpol’s new album, Our Love to Admire, is identical to its highest praise: It sounds a lot like their old stuff.

And their old stuff is great. So there.

But I write to you today, my dear Post-Rockists, to laud another album, Beck’s Midnight Vultures. Every year since its release in 1999 I’ve come back to it, usually in the late summer, and it has revived me from fatigue, brightened nasty moods, and filled me with vigor and energy. It does something to me that music doesn’t really do to me: It makes me feel kind of sexy, or at least sexual. It makes me walk fearlessly and full of moxie. It gives me an indefatigable confidence. My dancing transfigures from clumsy, Steve Urkel-like thrustings to downright James Brown ecstasy-inducing funkifying fleet-footings (or at least it feels that way).

I’m not sure what Beck was smoking when he wrote this album, but I want some and I want some more of this album. His creativity is undaunted on this album. He devises lyrics that shake their asses in the face of conventional phrases and dry hump the English language into exhaustion. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t exist. / I’ll leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed.” These and others are quite literally the coolest lyrics I’ve ever heard. They make no sense, but they exude an attitude and a reckless abandon that is thrilling.

If you listen to the album carefully, you’ll find that it’s extremely complicated, layered, and inventive. Absurdly so. For example, the sound of a sword pulled from its sheath at the beginning “Pressure Zone” makes absolutely no sense but for the fact that it sounds really, really cool. Wait, I take that back. I didn’t realize until re-reading that last sentence that the sound is more suggestive than I had thought. Just goes to show that this album is also all about the dirty.

I could write more, but that’s not why I’m putting words to internet right now. I’m here to ask for help. Beck hasn’t made anything like Midnight Vultures again. One might consider Sea Change a kind of sequel to Mutations, and I would say that Guero wasn’t so much Midnight Vultures 2 as much as it was Odelay 2, if it was even that. I like The Information, but much like Guero, the album leaves me with a feeling that Beck is being experimental for the sake of being experimental. Not since Midnight Vultures has Beck been so much fun, and since he’s older and wiser, it’s doubtful he’ll every make an album like Midnight Vultures again.

So what I want to know, so what I need to find, so what I need from you, dear readers, is some album or band with the dancetastic verve, energy, and fun of Midnight Vultures. Please comment or email. Throw a dog a bone. The closest I’ve come is Junior Senior’s D-D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat and the best of George Clinton and James Brown, but there’s got to be some other alternatives out there. The Scissor Sisters are close, but not quite it.

Help. I want more Midnight Vultures.

–Posted by Scotter