If you don’t like Beck, then “Modern Guilt” may be the Beck album for you. Even for an artist who’s built a career out of reinventing himself, this represents a significant departure. Gone (for the most part) are the endearingly improvised beats, the goofy lyrics and the odd white-bread rap tracks; Beck has gotten serious since his last outing, and so has his production quality.

Dropping The Dust Brothers, the production duo that gave us Odelay and Guero, Beck picked up DJ/producer Danger Mouse for “Guilt.” This should have been a perfect match. Beck defies genre categorization; an album will run from blues and rock to Brazilian tropicalia to syrupy, slide-guitar country ballad. Danger Mouse is just as hard to classify; the common thread connecting his work with Jemini, Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley is that it’s uniformly excellent. As you’d expect from such collaboration, no two songs on “Guilt” sound the same. Unfortunately, the project misfires; the result is an album that doesn’t sound like Beck.

Beck’s trademark sense of humor seems to have been lost in the shuffle. It’s hard to believe that this is the same guy whose first hit featured the refrain: “Soy un perdador/I’m a loser, baby/So why don’t you kill me.” His songwriting has moved onto more serious topics, like modern alienation, environmental devastation and cigarettes. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. A few tracks sound like Beck raided Radiohead’s cutting room floor.

On “Replica,” you could easily swap Beck’s voice with something by Thom Yorke, without anything sounding out of place. The same goes for “Chemtrails” and, to a lesser extent, “Youthless.” Still, his lyrics aren’t any more coherent or even syntactically correct than his other albums; even with some heavy subject matter, trying to make sense of the words can still be like looking for philosophy in a fortune cookie. If you’re looking for something to put on your Facebook profile, pick up another album (or try reading).

At the same time, there are a few gems. The opening track, “Orphans,” shows off the Danger Mouse touch, with oh-so-subtle backing vocals and judiciously placed electronic noise anchored by a loping acoustic guitar line. This slides into “Gamma Ray,” which features stripped-down drums and bass, a four-chord surf-rock guitar line and just enough electronic embellishments to remind you that Danger Mouse is in the production booth. Danger Mouse gets his feature on “Walls”; a smooth slide-guitar-and-string-section sample is matched to a snare-heavy drum beat for a contrasting effect so nice you almost wish he’d saved it for his next Jemini collaboration, instead of wasting it on Beck. The album wraps up with a few nods to his old work; the grungy guitar line on “Soul of a Man” wouldn’t be out of place on “Mellow Gold,” and the closer, “Volcano,” with choral and string backings, sounds like a lost track from “Mutations.”

If you’re a Beck fan, you’re probably going to buy or steal this regardless of how it’s reviewed. If you’ve never listened to Beck before, or you have and you didn’t like it, pick up this album. It doesn’t sound like his other work, but even a mediocre Beck album is better than most stuff out there.