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Title: bland
Review: As a big fan of Beck and beautiful bummer music, I was really let down by this release. I don't find one song of great beauty on here, or anything with which I connect on an emotional level. His singing here is flat and static. The lyrics are hard to hear. The arrangements are odd, sterile, and echoey, and the songs all crawl off to nowhere. Anyone looking to get into music of this nature would do better to buy Nick Drake, Pernice Brothers, Iron and Wine, Ron Sexsmith, Fairport Convention, Love, Bread, Elliott Smith, Josh Rouse, and Tim Buckley, to name just ten. All these artists take sad songs and subjects and elevate things with climbs and arrangement drama. Here, Beck borrows their bells and whistles, adds them at all the wrong times, and mumbles into a microphone inside Nigel Godrich's thousand-acre studio. Result's a snoozer.
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