**1/2 Jeff Beck

WHO ELSE!

(Epic)

Sure the title's audacious, but not anywhere as flip as guitar legend Jeff Beck's compositional sense, which seems anchored in mid-'70s jazz-rock fusion. Numbers like the daft "What Mama Said" and the slide-guitar essay "Angel (Footsteps)" inevitably slope toward the kind of funky-bottomed flash that dominated his classic Blow by Blow and Wired albums. So the impression is either that Beck is totally unaware of how pop music has moved both ahead and backward in its aesthetics during the past 20 years or that he just doesn't give a damn. Probably the latter, but when his mile-wide tone kicks in, only sticklers care where the tunes are going (usually nowhere!). And no one should care about the invisible, heavily programmed rhythm section. Who Else! continues to prove that nobody gets as much sound and raw energy out of a guitar as Beck, and there's always something thrilling in that.

-- Ted Drozdowski

(Jeff Beck performs next Saturday, March 20, at the Orpheum. Call 931-2000.)