The following was originally published in our Killer CD's section.
Review by Dan Grote
There are two Beck Hansen’s roaming the
earth. One Beck is responsible for penning the slacker/cowboy/sex albums
Mellow Gold, Odelay, and Midnite Vultures, while the other, mellower Beck,
can take the credit for One Foot in the Grave, Mutations, and Sea Change,
the latter being his mellowest yet most carefully orchestrated work to
date.
On Sea Change, it would appear that Beck’s
musical pendulum couldn’t swing any further in either direction, as the
oversexed hyperactivity of Vultures has met its opposite equal on this
album of predominantly acoustic folk weepers. The lore behind Sea Change
is that Beck wrote the songs as the result of a breakup. If this is the
impetus driving Change, the albums asphyxiatingly somber tone is understandable,
because by this same logic, Beck must have been getting a lot of sex while
he was writing Vultures.
Concept master that Beck is, there is not
a single ray of sunshine to spoil Sea Change. Though the opening lines
of the first track, “The Golden Age” are “Grab on to the wheel, let the
Golden Age begin,” there’s nothing golden about these twelve songs of heartbreak.
In fact, Beck spends much of the album passive-aggressively crying into
his guitar hole, such as when he says on “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” “It’s
only tears that I’m crying / it’s only you that I’m losing / guess I’m
doing fine.”
What Beck does best on this album is make
himself sound alone with his guitar despite being backed by a full orchestra,
especially on tracks like “Paper Tiger” and “Lonesome Tears.” Said orchestral
sounds come in addition to the usual suspect sidemen that are drummer Joey
Waronker and company. In fact, the string sections and occasional piano
are the most in your face aspects of this album, as the strings do the
screaming at the end of “Lonesome Tears” and the piano does the crying
on “Little One.” In fact, there are only two un-Sea Change moments on Sea
Change, the staticky epilogue of “Sunday Sun” and a shot of electric guitar
on “Paper Tiger.”
VERDICT: Do not operate heavy machinery
while listening to this album. What Mutations’ “Nobody’s Fault but My Own”
began, this album finishes by pushing Beck’s melancholy to the extreme,
and while you never hear him cry, the meticulous orchestration does it
for him. If Sea Change is as ‘album of the year’ as many critics are wetting
the bed insisting it is, then it’s been a sad year.
CD Info
Beck:
Sea Change
Label: DGC
Records
Rating:
Tracks: The Golden Age
Paper Tiger
Guess I'm Doing Fine
Lonesome Tears
Lost Cause
End Of The Day
It's All In Your Mind
Round The Bend
Already Dead
Sunday Sun
Little One
Side Of The Road
