This time, they seem to have found a much more effective balance between those albums' bland folk-rock stylings and the bohemian oddball hip-hop/indie crossover with which he's more commonly associated.  Full text...

Where last year's Guero sounded like a not-quite-right reprise of all his old moves, The Information makes for a much more satisfying return to past Beck sounds, and one that points the way to the future.  Full text...

The album peaks with the bluesy retro-funk of the single "Cellphone's Dead" and bottoms out with the dubby 13-minute-long "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/ Exoskeleton" (featuring inane banter between director Spike Jonze and author Dave Eggers), but along the way, it scores a lot of points, thanks to Nigel Godrich's earthy but twisted production.  Full text...

Beck's gone electro. And it's brilliant  Full text...

True to form, Beck's ninth CD The Information is yet another twisted, meandering journey to the freaky centre of the musical chameleon's mind.  Full text...

The Information -- one of the best albums Beck has ever made...  Full text...

Listening to luminous gems such as Dark Star and Elevator Music the possibilities — like the conceptual album artwork of blank sleeve and stickers — seem endless for Beck again. All that is missing is the shock of the new, and Beck cannot do anything about that.  Full text...

The Information, Beck’s ninth studio album and third with producer Nigel Godrich, is, in some respects, an overload of 21st century post-post-modernism, a rhythmic bulk of terrestrial instrumentation and space-junk miscellanea that makes giddy revelry out of its own contradictions.  Full text...

Coming just 18 months after his last album, Guero, and produced by Nigel Godrich, you'd think you'd know what to expect from The Information - that is, if anyone could accurately and confidently predict what an artist as famously eccentric as Beck Hansen was going to do next.  Full text...

Beck's last record, the Dust Brothers produced "Guero", promised a return to the "Odelay" sound we hankered after yet only proved that he was skirting perilously close to sounding too much like, well, Beck. That its swift follow-up, "The Information", stays in similar cut and paste gonzo hip-hop territory would set off alarm bells were Nigel Godrich - producer of the melancholic acoustic washes of the brilliant "Sea Change" and "Mutations" - not at the boards. Released between, and often exceeding, the blockbuster productions like "Midnite Vultures", these albums were spaces in which Beck dropped his pop art masks.  Full text...

Beck has spent 12 years deconstructing musical genres, using samples and beats to bring together the future and the past, and listening to him pick apart himself is just as exhilarating.   Full text...

If you love Beck you won't be disappointed.  Full text...

This time, über-producer Nigel Godrich is the main collaborator, and his psychedelic studio wizardry one-ups the Dust Brothers' sample-based concoctions at nearly every turn. The record also benefits from a future-sick quasi-concept worthy of Philip K. Dick (or Thom Yorke).   Full text...

For better or worse then, The Information is both exactly what you feared it might be and also a document of some of Beck’s best groove-based material since Midnite Vultures.   Full text...

Call it information overload. Beck’s third collaboration with celebrated producer Nigel Godrich is the most Beck-like to date.  Full text...

Melodies are average or nonexistent and lyrical content is the usual junkyard surrealism, but none of that's the point this time. Nigel Godrich's grounded production ensures "The Information" simply sounds too good to ignore. Every found sound is perfectly tracked, making even the benign throwaway "Dark Star" noticeable.  Full text...

However annoying it sounds, give The Information a chance. By the time Horrible Fanfare rolls around, 15 numbers in, you'll be too dazed to resist.  Full text...

There are plenty of good things here, but there's also a sense of artist and producer (and Godrich's presence sometimes overwhelms even Beck) operating in default mode.  Full text...

With The Information, Beck ignores the lessons of that outing, instead producing a much more mature record that has none of the immediacy of either Dust Brothers collaboration.  Full text...

All in all The Information isn’t exactly a bad album but it’s one of Becks worst efforts.  Full text...