Beck is the master of his own style, but he still manages to create a whole new genre with each project. And he's done it again with The Information. Enlisting the help of producer Nigel Godrich, who is best known for his work with Radiohead and produced Beck’s melancholy Sea Change, this 3-year project, started in 2003 and hacked out during his heavy Guero touring schedule, is touted as being a hip-hop record. But while it might have hip-hop influences, it is far from being hip-hop in the traditional sense.

Instead, imagine a futuristic, steel jungle. Now add Beck's dadaistic lyrics, steely guitar sounds, crawling bass, and some polyphonic background vocals and you're beginning to get at this album. The first tune "Elevator Music" opens with Beck rapping and introduces us to the framework of the album where relatively loose song structures provide the backdrop for the extraneous sampling. I heard human voices and conversations, telephone sounds, and space ship noises as well as numerous electronic patterns.

But even through the sampling Beck has maintained much of his traditional style, and one can hear hints of Guero as well as earlier albums (especially Odelay) throughout. However, even though some tunes, notably, "Nausea" and "Cellphone is Dead" are so reminiscent of Beck's earlier grooves, it is impossible to pin them down to a single song, because they are so artfully crafted into this new form. Even more, he moves from style to style within this form. Take for example, "Strange Apparition." This is nothing more than a folk tune with heavy-pedaled piano and guitar, but it becomes a part of this futuristic style with Beck's two-voiced harmony and the vaguest hint of harmonica. He moves with equal facility through "New Round," which is a chant-flavored song with hopeful lyrics, and into "1000BPM," a straight up, hip-hop tune with a social issues based lyric. He finishes the album with a whopping 10 minute track called "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton" in which he moves through a variety of styles and ends with a vague dialogue about a space ship (a conversation between director Spike Jonze and author Dave Eggers), tying together the album's futuristic theme.

Buy the hard copy of this album and you will get stickers and a DVD with improvised music videos of each of the album's 16 tracks and featuring Beck's wife, his bandmates, and their friends. But despite this perk, it is more likely the fact that Beck's fans are waiting, like I have been, for the next new genre that he will create, that has caused The Information to hit the charts at #7 this week – its first week on the charts. And they will in no way be disappointed.