For a long time, Guero was actually my favorite Beck album. Some days, it still is, and probably for the same reasons that others don’t give it as much credit. Since it was Beck’s first return toOdelay’s general aesthetic in nine years, Guero was the album to establish what the recurring “Beck sound” would be (even though it’s really only recurred, across the board, once more onThe Information). People love it for that reason. Hearing mid-30s Beck hop from sound to sound between songs, now with a sharpened craft and a bit more of a settled down mentality, is an interesting and sort of unexpected update on the sound that made him a major star. The flipside of that is that all those factors are also what, in many people’s eyes, diminish Guero to some extent. Most conversations about Beck skew positive on the topic of Guero, but it’s always followed by qualifiers. It’s not as surprising and bizarre and giddy as Odelay. And even if someone might yield that Guero shouldn’t be, considering it was made by a man ten years older than the one who made Odelay, this is what tends to keep Guero from really contending for the #1 spot in Beck’s catalog. Guero plays with different sounds and moods, but usually from song to song; Odelay crashed all sorts of different stuff together within single songs, making the whole thing seem more invigorating and unique to Guero’s slightly mellowed, calmer approach to the whole thing.

Guero is where my contrarian taste with regards to Beck’s catalog really comes into play: personally, I prefer it to Odelay. Again, I realize it’s weird to complain about an element of Beck’s music that is pretty much his trademark, but while I appreciate the sheer sonic lunacy of Odelay, these days some of those songs just haven’t aged well to me, whereas Guero is a dark horse candidate for the most consistent Beck record, song for song. There’s the obvious heavy hitters, from the massive groove of opener “E-Pro,” to gratifyingly straight-up pop of “Girl,” to the simmering churn of “Black Tambourine.” But the latter half of Guero goes dustier and occasionally moodier, and that’s where the fact that Beck made this one in his 30s really shows. It doesn’t sound amused and smirking in the way of the man’s ’90s stuff. The run of “Broken Drum” to “Scarecrow” to “Go It Alone” to “Farewell Ride” to “Rental Car” is some frayed, bleary 21st century road music. Guero is still an expansive listen, but there’s something to be said for the control and direction that came with a more mature — and, presumably, happier, as he was about to get married and become a father — Beck. Sometimes I think Guero is the closest we have to a complete and total distillation of Beck as a musician, even more so than Odelay. Maybe I could attribute that partially to its current midway-point status in Beck’s career, or to the fact that it’s autobiographical name is a reference to the Spanish slang term applied to Beck during his youth in Los Angeles. Whatever the case, I’ll always hold a special appreciation for Guero, the album where Beck’s far-reaching tendencies and a streamlining impulse meet somewhere in the middle, resulting in an album that’s simply full of great songs allowed to exist as they are.