Photo: Chris Tuite for RollingStone.com

The songs on Beck’s excellent new album Modern Guilt are sparse forays into ’60s pop and psychedelia, something reflected in his approach to his current stripped-down tour. So it’s ironic that Beck kicked off the short jaunt in Reno on the world’s largest indoor stage. “I thought, ‘Shit, this goes on forever!’ ” Beck says. “If I had known, I would have really done something special.” Click below for more on Beck’s tour, including his scrapped lighting ideas and his collaborations with opener Devendra Banhart.

• Beck Debuts Stripped Down Tour in Reno

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Beck kept things simple at the launch of his 2008 North American tour at the Grand Sierra Theatre in Reno, Nevada, on Thursday night. No marionettes, no Flaming Lips, no flaming guitars or leaf-blowers, but just the full range and restlessness of his music and a minimum of special effects, with a packed set-list stretching from the early ’90s and up to his new album, Modern Guilt.

Beck arrived onstage with blond hair down to his shoulders and slid right into the tense groove of “Devil’s Haircut” as he and his four-piece band unleashed a quick succession of recent tunes: the funky, rumbling “Nausea” and a frantic “Timebomb.” Things slowed down long enough for Beck to play several moments of raw, gutbucket slide guitar, leading into the opening of “Loser,” the twangy post-modern blues rant that launched his career back in 1994.

Among the newest songs was “Gamma Ray,” with its go-go beat and Beck’s jittery lyrics on melting icecaps and “smokestack lightning out my window.” (more…)

Yesterday, Beck gave us a video trailer and 30-second clips from his Modern Guilt and today, he’s giving us two whole songs. Over at Beck’s iLike page, the first two cuts from the Danger Mouse-produced album’s track list, “Orphans” and “Gamma Ray,” are both streaming in their entirety alongside the previously-released “Chemtrails.” If you’re keeping track at home, that’s 3/10s of the new Beck album. Modern Guilt is due out July 8th… unless your local bar has TouchTone jukebox. Starting on July 1st, over 10,000 Touchtone jukeboxes across the country will have the entire Modern Guilt available for your drunken listening pleasure, giving you something else to spend your quarters on instead of Big Buck Hunter. To find out if your neighborhood tavern will stock Modern Guilt early, use your cell phone to text BECK to 40411.

[Photo: Getty]

Beck’s new album Modern Guilt now has a definitive release date: July 7th. The album will contain 10 Danger Mouse-produced tracks, including the already-streamed “Chemtrails” and the already-performed “Modern Guilt.” For more info on the album, check out Rolling Stone’s exclusive preview, and click the jump for the full track list.
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As is tradition in the days before he releases a new album,
Beck played a secret show last night at the Echo in Los Angeles. In addition to a set list full of the singer’s greatest hits (sans “Loser”), Beck also used the evening to reveal five songs off his could-be-released-any-day-now new album Modern Guilt, including the album’s title track, which you can watch in the video above. For more info on the album, click here.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Beck sits down with Gavin Edwards to discuss the stories behind his classic 1996 album Odelay. There was only room for a handful of tracks in the magazine, but Beck discussed nearly all the songs on the just-released deluxe edition of the album, so we’ve run an extended version of the story online. For Beck’s take on the buried samples in “High 5 (Rock the Catskills)” and how Thurston Moore influenced “The Devil’s Haircut,” click here.

[Photo: Werb/Retna]

Beck recently released the deluxe two-disc edition of his classic 1996 album Odelay, and Rolling Stone’s Gavin Edwards got the full story on a number of the songs straight from the man himself. For Beck’s thoughts behind career-definers like “Devil’s Haircut” and deep cuts like “Burro” (along with streams of each), click here.

[Photo: Martyn Goodacre/Retna]

Soon to be a collector’s item, the initial run of Beck’s recently-released tenth anniversary edition of Odelay was mistakenly shipped to stores with a lyrics booklet that contained “unproofed lyrics that were taken from a lyrics website.” In other words, rather than asking Beck himself, the lyrics were taken, for “layout purposes,” from one of those websites you go to when you want to figure out what Snow is rapping in “Informer.” Beck apologizes for the oversight, and arrangements are being made to provide anyone who purchased the incorrect lyrics booklet with a corrected version, free of charge. Personally, we like the incorrect lyrics. “She’s alone in a new delusion” is certainly clearer than “She’s alone in the new pollution.”

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