He is a walking paradox.

With every note of his guitar, Jeff Beck confirms the insight that you have to get older to stay young.

He releases his studio albums in the familiar six-year cycle and is always good for a surprise.

The fact that the seventy-eight-year-old has teamed up with the scandal-ridden actor and wannabe rocker Johnny Depp for his latest work may irritate some.

But Beck insists that he hasn't had such a creative partner in years and that Depp was the driving force behind the new album.

In any case, he hopes that people will now accept him as a serious musician and soulful rock 'n' roll singer.

The album title "18" already indicates how much fun the two of them must have had during the recording.

Beck recalls, "When Johnny and I started playing together, our youthfulness came back and we joked about how we'd feel like we were eighteen again." What might have seemed like a smug nostalgia trip quickly turns out to be risk-taking survival -Training: In eleven cover versions with a focus on the "Golden Sixties" and two dope compositions, the two soul mates - they once played together with the Hollywood Vampires - define the state of the art of contemporary guitar rock.

The stylistic range is dizzying.

It ranges from Irish bagpipe music to tender love ballads and soul grooves to brute post-punk sounds.

The first radiant swells of "Midnight Walker" demonstrate the scrupulous sound culture that Beck cultivates on this album: Rarely has his instrument seemed more enticing than in this instrumental, which is originally played by Davy Spillane on "Uilleann Pipes".

The microtonal refinements that he creates here with his tremolo lever are breathtaking.

What follows is the greatest contrast imaginable: The cover version of Killing Joke's "Death And Resurrection Show" from 2003 comes with whipping industrial beats, while Depp's dark chant sounds robotically lifeless.

Anyone who thinks they can calm down with the ballad "Time" from Dennis Wilson's debut album will be driven out of their comfort zone again with the following "Sad Motherfuckin' Parade" and its nefarious noise architecture.

The fact that Beck is still a fan of the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" album is documented in two touching instrumentals that lovingly pay homage to the introspective masterpiece of the Californian pop romantics.

While "Don't Talk (Put Your Hand On My Shoulder)" captures the dreamy melt of Brian Wilson's vocals lightly on the fretboard, on "Caroline, No" Beck dives deep into the song's sensibility: "As I listened to the song to When I first heard it, it healed me from the Yardbirds, from Jimi Hendrix playing it all short and I had lost my girlfriend.”

The secret highlight of the album, however, is marked by the Depp composition "This Is A Song For Miss Hedy Lamarr" - performed in a smoky chant.

It is the melancholy homage to a Hollywood diva and a prevented inventor - as an opponent of National Socialism, the native of Vienna tried to develop a radio remote control for torpedoes for the Allies in 1940.

From the excessive life of a movie star to the dystopian deconstruction of a dominatrix fantasy, nobody would have associated Lou Reed's song "Venus In Furs" from the 1967 album "The Velvet Underground & Nico" with Beck's musical preferences until today.

Depp's persuasion also helped here.

With a conspiratorial, dark voice, he recites the famous opening lines "Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather / Whiplash girlchild in the dark".

Relief follows at once: the new version of the languid Everly Brothers hit "Let It Be Me" from 1960 explains why Beck is regarded as the great melodist of contemporary electric guitar.

Johnny Depp is the sensitive crooner here, as if he wanted to crawl into the microphone with his voice and caress the listener with his breath.

Closing this great album is John Lennon's 1970 song "Isolation." Beck dissects the pounding power chords like a scalpel, only to dissolve them into wailing wah-wah lines.

Beck's final solo sounds like one big inferno: redemption in purgatory.

It may seem cheap at first to record this song during the pandemic isolation period,