Here's the bottom line: Beck really wants you to shake your booty.

Really, he does. He almost demands it. He's kickin' it hard, and you better be doing the same. There may be penalties and consequences to that booty-shaking in his decaying party universe, but make no bones about it: he wants you to dance.

You'll probably find it hard to avoid doing just that, because if nothing else--if you accept it only on its most superficial level--Midnite Vultures is easily one of the great party albums of the nineties. The first six tracks are all solid soul-funk grooves, like something concocted by Prince and George Clinton's resentful love child. Things start with a bang on the single "Sexxlaws," which tears out of the box with an edgy horn riff and a catchy chorus that continues building in intensity as the song progresses. The music continues its electric slide along the funkadelic path for about the next half-hour, with sound combinations sliding out of your speaker that were easily worth waiting two years to hear. Beck and his production team have spent a lot of time constructing the samples and effects for this record, and their meticulous attention to detail shows--it's the tightest work Beck's ever done.

As the rollicking final chorus of "Peaches and Cream" reaches its conclusion ("Keep your lamplight trimmed and burning"), the party starts to unravel. It's around track seven, "Broken Train," that the album's sound shifts back toward something closer to Odelay than a get-down explosion. And it's around that moment that the darkness lurking in Beck's lyrics explodes almost imperceptibly.

There's an element of the grotesque in all the songs on this album, but listening to the first half of Vultures, you can lose yourself in the groove and avoid contemplating boiling swimming pools and girls with cellophane chests. But you can't deny the horrors of Beck's twisted celebration for long. On "Broken Train," Beck offers a line that undercuts any suggestions of warmth or fraternity you may have been harboring throughout the earlier portions of the album: "This is the real me, ladies/You won't find no shelter here."

It's like a punch in the gut, and it just zings right by, and if you've been listening to the words, you're left bruised and battered. You may have been blissfully shuffling your way through Vulture's party grooves, but in that moment, Beck takes a baseball bat and shatters your kneecaps. His reading of the line gains more cold detachment each time you hear it, and when you place it in the context of the song--a subtle diatribe against the disconnection of the upper class from the realities around them, or maybe just a string of zingers against sleazy record industry execs--it becomes even more vicious. You realize he's just taken a musical form built around community and fucking and taken all the soul from it with his words. It ain't no mindless celebration; it's a hollow wake for true human connections. "You won't find no shelter here"--you can try, you can sleep around and you can believe you're connecting, but reality is black and frigid. There is no shelter; there is no solace. The party leads to death.

This is a frighteningly stunning record, stunning because of its layers of meaning and frightening because those layers get progressively more bleak as you uncover them. You can dismiss the record's closing track, for example, as simply a humorous take on the traditional slow sexy soul groove. But the more you listen to "Debra," the more desperate and uncaring it becomes. The narrator can't even be bothered to remember the name of the lady he's trying to chat up ("I met you at J.C. Penny/I think your name tag said 'Jenny'"), because he wants to get with her sister Debra. It's all about the sex, all about the image, all slick and empty.

Don't get me wrong; Midnite Vultures is a fun record, even if you pick up on the brutal undercurrents simmering beneath its surface. Beck's provided plenty of ear candy and phat grooves to keep your feet tapping and your bootie moving. It's the implications of living that party lifestyle that Beck seems obsessed with revealing--the shallow detachment, the soulless behavior, the sense of endless loss. Have fun while you can, he seems to be saying, because it's all just an ugly facade. Behind her garish makeup, the hot honey you've been chatting up wears a bleak, hopeless mask of despair.