Modern Guilt Review

That last song sums up Beck's biggest issue on the album: "Don't know what I've done, but I feel ashamed." That's modern guilt for you: knowing the world's going to hell and feeling partly responsible, but not quite knowing what to do about it. "Some days, we're worse than you can imagine/And how am I supposed to live with that?" he sings on "Walls." A few lines later, he finds his own reason to carry on: "We do the best with the souls we're given." And not long after he sings these words, the song cuts out abruptly in the middle of the melody. Like Tony Soprano said, you never know when your time is gonna come.
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If anything, Modern Guilt may be just a little bit too transient, as it doesn't dig quite as deep as its subjects might suggest, but that's also par for the course for both Beck and Danger Mouse: they tend to prefer feel to form. Here, they deliver enough substance and style to make Modern Guilt an effective dosage of 21st century paranoia.
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