There are three Beck albums that sum up everything he is generally about in one package: Odelay, Guero, and The Information. Meaning, these are the expansive ones, the albums that hold some facet of pretty much every Beck characteristic, at least musically and in some ways tonally. These are the records where irony and earnestness sit alongside each other, in songs ranging from blues-folk to psychedelia to alt-rock to rap to stuff that amalgamates a bit of all of it at once. In terms of Guero and The Information, the relationship makes sense. When The Information was released in 2006, it seemed like a rapid-fire follow-up to 2005’s Guero, when in reality the sessions for the two were interspersed between each other, with The Informationbeing a project that dated back to Beck’s 2003 sessions with Nigel Godrich and continued between the two in annual meetings.

As an album in the grand scheme of Beck’s career, a similar thing could be said for The Information as it could be for One Foot In The Grave: in a different discography, this would likely rank a little higher, but when pitted against Beck’s other, more famous albums, The Information’s standing suffers. In fact, I feel like this album’s always kind of received a bad rap from fans and critics, despite garnering generally strong reviews, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Meaning, it often feels like this is the album people care about least about out of any of the albums Beck has released since he got really famous. Part of this seems rooted in that relationship between this album and Guero and Odelay: after years of surprising left turns, Beck offered up two albums in a row that actually sounded like the idea of Beck people had in their heads. It could start to feel like repetition, I guess. Thing is, The Information has some of what I’d argue are Beck’s most quietly enduring songs — these aren’t necessarily the big famous ones off Odelay or Guero, but they’re often more rewarding than they’re given credit for. The Beggars Banquet-vibes of “Strange Apparition” and the melancholic psychedelia of “Soldier Jane” (and, in a more stoned form, “New Round”) are all highlights, and wound up prefiguring 2008’s very ’60s-indebted Modern Guilt. “Think I’m In Love” is one of Beck’s best straight-up pop (or love) songs. Meanwhile, “Cellphone’s Dead” has no business working as well as it does, constantly switching between that spaced-out, percussive refrain section and synth-bass robo-funk verses in a way that’s far cleaner and less nasty than a similar mash-up would’ve been executed on, say, Mellow Gold. Aside from the fact that it perhaps didn’t linger as strongly as Beck’s other records because it was, at that point, far less of a surprise, one of the only problems with The Information is that it’s overlong and becomes uneven in its latter third. (Closing the album with “Movie Theme” instead of the pointless and tedious “The Horrible Fanfare” might’ve done wonders for its flow alone.) Personally, I’d take The Information over a few of the albums that follow on this list, but the fact remains that the album occupies a lower stature — if in greatness/importance rather than quality — amongst most of Beck’s output.