(FORTUNE Magazine) – Beck Midnite Vultures (DGC)

The party album is an endangered species. Decades ago it was common practice for bands to release records that felt like savage beasts trained for the sole purpose of tearing down the house. (They had titles like Get Wild With the Troggs or House Party With the Isley Brothers.) By now it's rare to come across a disk that dishes out nothing but dopey, delirious joy from start to finish.

Packed with falsetto soul testimonials and white-boy funk bacchanals, Midnite Vultures rescues the dodo of the party album and lets it roam free in a new habitat: the polyglot sprawl of Los Angeles. Like Beck's previous albums, it's all over the place. At any moment Midnite might sound like a hoedown in a video arcade, or a Turkish broadcast of Soul Train, or the soundtrack to a break-dancing flick directed by Andy Warhol. The unifying principle is nothing more profound than pure fun. Which is fine. Beck has already granted us one "important" manifesto--1996's acclaimed cut-and-paste cornucopia, Odelay--so we're willing to give him a lot of leeway. Besides, Midnite Vultures pretty much thwarts criticism: You can't write it off as a meaningless romp, because that's exactly what it's supposed to be.

--Jeff Gordinier

MARK HARRIS and JEFF GORDINIER are, respectively, assistant managing editor and senior writer at Entertainment Weekly