Back in the day, a girl that I was chasing used to be obsessed with Beck. Like any good lovestruck teenager with cash to spare, I immediately went out and bought the man's latest album, which happened to be the lingering fan favourite "Odelay!". Despite my feverish attempts to connect with the music though, I simply couldn't see what she saw in him. Sure, I could see that he was obviously a fairly talented individual, and his music often took delightfully unexpected turns, as if he couldn't decide what genre he was a part of, but the eclectic mixture that was his music just never connected with me. Eventually, the girl went and decided to date some jerk rugby player who would have beaten me senseless for even thinking about his girl, and I wrote Beck off as an example of a particularly successful novelty act.

That was, until "Guero" landed on my desk for review. Gingerly, I popped it into my stereo to have a listen, and it sounded to me like not a day had passed since those times in the mid-90s. The man is still seemingly hell-bent on appropriating elements from every musical genre in existence into his sound, he still sounds like he has the attention span of a schoolboy who's full of red cordial and tequila, and for the life of me, I still cannot see what all of the fuss is about.

Sure, there's batches of odd samples, white-boy rap, and plain old-fashioned indie rock elements in here. You can never quite tell where the music is going to go next, and the whole thing has that endearingly dorky atmosphere about it that teenage girls seem to love, but the whole thing just feels to practiced, too polished to really have the impact that "Odelay!" had on me all those years ago. Whereas that album stood well enough on its own, "Guero" feels like a colossal in-joke that only people who have followed Beck for years are going to get.

On music alone though, this album disappoints. Many of the unpredictable turns that he's pulled before get a rerun on this album, and even though I'm not a dedicated fan, it seems that I've heard most of the bizarre set-pieces before somewhere. More annoyingly, it seems like he's been smoking too many cancer tubes, see Broken Drum, which sounds like it has that guy from Creed singing. The bright, sunny Girl is better, but it's in the minority as a song which is delivered with clarity and a sense of purpose.

Which brings me back to that girl, who has since dumped that rugby player. I gave this album a spin, and asked her what she thought about it. She told me that she loved it, and it was another stunning entry in an amazing discography. If you already have a high opinion of Beck, you're likely to enjoy this, even though it seems that he's already pulled most of his tricks before. For those of us looking in from outside though, this album probably just won't have enough firepower to draw you in.