An Ear For Sound Avant Garde Musical Artist Beck Is Less A Songwriter Than An Arranger Of Sonic Landscapes

Most successful pop musicians have a knack for writing unforgettable melodies, lilting harmonies, exquisite arrangements, irresistible rhythms or revelatory lyrics.

Beck, 25, Los Angeles faux naif who refuses to acknowledge that his one hit (“Loser”) has any musical or cultural significance whatsoever, possesses some of these gifts. But he has two things that are more important: raw instinct and a restless creativity.

Whether lazily rattling an acoustic guitar or piecing together an elaborate sonic web, Beck is guided by an ear for sound and its placement in space. He has been called a slacker rapper, an indie bluesman and a Gen X Dylan leading a new folk revolution.

But the truth is that Beck is a sound arranger. His songs only seem randomly constructed, strummed or sung; in truth, to remove a single lyric or sound from a piece would destroy it. His music appears unwieldy, on the verge of collapse, yet like a spinning top it has a momentum that keeps it from crashing to the ground.

On none of the three albums that Beck has released in the last two years is the density greater and the momentum more dizzying than on his newest, “Odelay” (Geffen), an album designed to be heard while in motion in a car. Donkeys bray, kiddie toys talk, keyboards sputter and voices scream as Beck switches between slide guitar, vintage synthesizers, harmonica, celesta and answering-machine tapes in an approach best summed up by the song title “Ramshackle.”

Yet “Odelay” (the title is a Spanish colloquialism not unlike the slang word cool) is not an overly odd or experimental record.

Currently No. 16 on Billboard’s album chart, it is a pop album rooted in folk and blues that has been sabotaged by noises and intermissions. Between distorted hip-hop collages are simple, though slightly skewed, folk-country songs reminiscent of the Grateful Dead.

The organ-infused rap “Where It’s At” settles down so that a woman’s voice can say, “That’s beautiful, Dad”; in the laid-back country rocker “Lord Only Knows,” Beck pauses to play a squealing, pre-programmed solo on a toy guitar.

Nothing on “Odelay” sounds like a traditional pop hit, yet almost everything is eminently listenable and innovative. One reason for this similarity is that the Dust Brothers, who produced the Beastie Boys’ most complex album, “Paul’s Boutique, helped stack up the sounds on “Odelay.”

The record’s catchiest song, “High Five (Rock the Catskills),” is a rap-along that will have an entire carful of listeners joining in on the chorus: “High five, more dead than alive/ Rocking the plastic like a man from the Catskills.” (The Catskills line could suggest anything, from charging a lot on a credit card, to rapping into a microphone, to making out with a plastic surgery survivor.)

But just as the funky, free-flowing “High Five” begins to sound like the only song on the album that could be a radio hit, it disappears, and 10 seconds of a quiet Schubert composition intrude, followed by 20 seconds of incomprehensible murmuring.

Suddenly, the song’s chorus breaks through the near-silence like a football player crashing through a paper barrier. For Beck, expectations are anathema: just because a song starts out like a rap doesn’t mean it will end like one.

On past albums, in which Beck seemed to randomly string together lyrics, the words made a sort of sense. A line like “I got a funny feeling they got plastic in the afterlife” from his “One Foot in the Grave” album has its own whimsical sense of social commentary.

But on “Odelay,” the lyrics are more cryptic than ever, and there are only bursts of lucidity. The line “So I’m picking up the pieces and I’m putting them up for sale/And throw your meal ticket out the window, put your skeletons in jail,” for example, in “God Only Knows” is just Beck’s way of saying “Take it easy.”

On the surface, “Odelay” is a reflection of channel-surfing, thrift-store-shopping, job-shirking youth culture. Even without a hit like “Loser” whose chorus says “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” under his belt, it would still be easy to make Beck a generational symbol.

But he is also the product of a unique confluence: his maternal grandfather was part of the 60s avant-garde artist group Fluxus; his mother is a sometime punk-rock guitarist, and his paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister.

Certainly these are touchstones of his music, a coming together of avant-garde exploration, do-it-yourself punk and unwavering traditionalism. It is at this crossroads between symbol and individual that “Odelay” stands, engineered by a musician who is completely of his time and out of it simultaneously.