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Guero is the ninth studio album by American musician Beck, released on March 29, 2005, by Interscope Records. It was produced with John King and Mike Simpson of the Dust Brothers, who had worked with Beck on his 1996 album Odelay, as well as Tony Hoffer.
The album was promoted with the singles "E-Pro", "Girl", and "Hell Yes", and debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200. To date, it is Beck's highest-charting album and had sold over 868,000 copies in the United States as of July 2008. It received positive reviews from critics.
Beck was raised in a prominently Chicano area of Los Angeles. In an interview with ABC's Nightline, Beck said the term "guero" was "something that I'd hear growing up. Something I'd hear on the street, walking to school or something, I'd get called a 'Guero'. ... It's just a word that stuck in my head and I wanted to do something with that at some point. ... I ended up, in the end, just kind of doing this almost journalistic kind of look at that whole time."
The title of track 2, "Qué Onda Guero" (or "¿Qué onda, güero?"), is Mexican slang for "what up, whitey?"
"Hell Yes" features spoken contributions from Christina Ricci, who happened to be in the studio at the time of recording. Beck and the Dust Brothers had spent weeks auditioning sushi waitresses around Los Angeles but chose Ricci after she "tried it and just absolutely nailed it". She is credited as "Kurisuti-na" in the album's liner notes.
Jack White of the White Stripes plays Bass guitar on "Go It Alone". Money Mark, solo artist and keyboardist for the Beastie Boys, plays the organ on "Earthquake Weather". Petra Haden, formerly of That Dog and the Rentals, provides an intricate backing vocal track for "Rental Car".
Guero was released on March 29. The album was released simultaneously in three formats: a standard 13-track CD, PlayStation Portable UMD and a deluxe CD/DVD edition. The latter featured seven bonus tracks, a surround sound mix and interactive video art for each song.
Later in 2005, Beck released an album of Guero remixes called Guerolito, featuring remixes by Boards of Canada, Octet, the Beastie Boys' Ad-Rock and the Dust Brothers' John King.
"Black Tambourine" was featured in the David Lynch film Inland Empire, the trailer for the film (500) Days of Summer, and episode 22 of season 4 of The Good Wife, as well as the 2006 video game Lumines II, and the video game . "Farewell Ride" was featured in FX trailers promoting the final season of The Shield.
Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone called the album "the first record since Odelay where Beck mixes up the medicine the way he did in his Nineties prime". Contrasting the album with the "wiseass charisma" of his early albums, Sheffield noted that Beck now sounded "like an extremely bummed-out dude who made it to the future and discovered he hates it there." David Browne of Entertainment Weekly called Guero "alive and frisky" when compared to its predecessor, Sea Change (2002), and called it Beck's "most inviting, least off-putting work in years", praising its "slightly broader emotional range". Browne stated that the album felt "simultaneously familiar and new" and was "the first record on which the many moods and sides of Beck coexist". Andy Gill of The Independent observed that "Beck darts around the musical map like an animated flea," and praised the album's "judicious blends of beats, riffs, songs and raps spiralling off in a variety of directions". Gill highlighted the song "Missing" and its "reflections on the essential patchwork incompleteness of life", comparing it to Beck's work on the whole, "which typically makes unorthodox wholes from diverse fragments."
Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork gave the album a mixed review and compared the album extensively to Odelay, stating, "one wonders whether Mr. Hansen's heart is in the proceedings, as many of the songs appear to be little more than weak echoes of their similar predecessors". Mitchum concluded that "the final result feels rote and calculated."
The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. (2006). 9780789313713, Universe. ISBN 9780789313713
| "E-Pro" | "So What'cha Want" | Beastie Boys |
| "Missing" | "Você e Eu" | Claus Ogerman and His Orchestra |
| "Black Tambourine" | "We Know We Gotta Live Together" | Eugene Blacknell & The New Breed |
| "Earthquake Weather" | "What It Is?" | The Temptations |
| "The Concept", "The Concept" | Slave | |
| "Hell Yes" | "Far East Mississippi" | The Ohio Players |
| "Under the Influence of Love" | Love Unlimited | |
| "Go It Alone" | "Outside Love" | Brethren |
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