I Think I’m In Love”

I have nev­er been what you could call a Beck fan. (As for Beck­’s, well, that would be a dif­fer­ent mat­ter.) Ever since the day in my fresh­man year at col­lege when a fel­low stu­dent told me that I looked like Beck (whom I had not pre­vi­ous­ly even heard of) I have a bit of a jaun­diced atti­tude toward the fel­low. And it is igno­rance rather than antipa­thy that most char­ac­teris­es my response to his musi­cal out­put; beyond the clas­sic “Los­er” and the admirable title track from 2005’s Guero, I would be hard pressed indeed to name or even recog­nise a song of his.

I will have to spend some more time with The Infor­ma­tion to real­ly call myself of a fan of either the album or the artist. The few lis­tens I have made did­n’t result in an over­whelm­ing impres­sion of any sort. But the two sin­gles def­i­nite­ly leap out from the crowd, even if you weren’t expect­ing them (as I was). “Nau­sea” reach­es out and demands repeat­ed, even ser­i­al lis­ten­ing, and does so more com­pelling­ly and smart­ly than any song this side of Jude’s “Rick James” which did­n’t leave my play­er for near­ly three months back in 1999. And “I Think I’m In Love” is so lack­adaisi­cal­ly catchy that it has earned the hon­our of being the first song loaded to my new mp3 play­er, where it will prob­a­bly burn a hole in my head before I tire of its sim­ple pop perfection.

So I like what lit­tle I know of this Beck guy and I shall prob­a­bly make some fur­ther effort to hear more of him. There are cer­tain­ly many artists I would con­sid­er it worse to be told I look like.

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