Like a magic mushroom for your ear hole, Beck's new single "Chemtrails" will send you on a psychedelic odyssey of the highest order. Created with Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse, the song is at once mellow and propulsive, contemplative and assertive with keyboard washes giving way to hard-hitting drum rolls as Beck muses, "So many people, where do they go?"
Although the title sounds as trippy as the sonics, "Chemtrails" is actually a reference to the Chemtrail conspiracy theory , which "holds that the trails seen behind some aircraft are not ordinary contrails, but are the result of high-altitude spraying of some kind of chemicals for some secret purpose."
Beck has posted "Chemtrails" here and here.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.