Beck Still Gets the Mix Right

More than anyone else, Beck, that baby-faced, dumpster-diving junk-culture archivist who pastes together a strange sonic collage of irony and inspiration, has become the artist of the ‘90s.

Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, during a warmup show for European dates and the summer concert season, Beck revealed that the hip-hop folkie who became a bona-fide rock star still has a lot of territories to explore.

Dressed in skin-hugging peg-legged pants and a Nehru-style shirt, Beck didn’t simply focus on songs from his popular and critically lauded 1996 album, “Odelay.” He also showcased tunes from his yet-to-be released new album that moved away from the trademark hip-hop folk of such songs as “Hotwax” and “Where It’s At.”

Pushing guitars to the forefront rather than the keyboards, samples and the now-familiar collage style, the new numbers felt like real stylistic departures: more unified and less a wild amalgam of spliced-together sounds.

They were all impressive nevertheless, a thoroughly modern mix of seen-it-all irony and real passion, from a sultry Latin number to a folk song with East Indian strings, from a Sonic Youth-like experiment to one journey into the hard-squalling world of heavy metal.

The standout song, though, was an escapist fling called “Running Away,” which sounded like a cross between a ‘60s Coca-Cola commercial, a garage pop band and the Beach Boys.

The rest of Beck’s show was a pure pop-culture explosion, with a talented seven-piece band filling out the songs with guitars, horns, saxophone, drums and keyboards. Performing a number of tongue-in-cheek dances like the Robot during “The New Pollution,” the Chicken during “Devils Haircut” and the Slide in the middle of “Where It’s At,” he borrowed from nearly everyone and somehow put a personal stamp on every move and sound.

In the mix were Tom Jones’ showmanship, James Brown’s dramatic funk, Bob Dylan’s harmonica-wielding folk, bluesmen’s stripped-down communion, David Lee Roth’s showy jumps and splits, and Grandmaster Flash’s colorful emceeing.

Beck offered Vegas, back-porch country and a Brooklyn house party vibe rolled into one. An LP scratch-master, DJ Swamp, also performed a crowd-awing solo of old-school-style turntable wizardry.

If it sounds like it was a wild concoction of bizarre references, it was. But probably the most exciting thing about Beck is that he manages to pull it together so that all of his far-flung citations sound practically seamless.

They also sound like his own vision, as if they come from someone who has inhaled everything that urban (and sometimes rural) America has to offer, from television junk to sidewalk patois and street-corner transistor radios.

And, judging by his new work, Beck is expanding his reach to incorporate styles that might be considered throwaway culture, like heavy metal guitars and surf pop.

In the end, Beck is simply one more step away from the odd fluke ready to be channel-surfed into oblivion. He is still an artist growing in impressive and mind-bending new directions.