Beck - Sea Change

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• BECK SEA CHANGE

Music reviews of Sea Change

Music Review: ascendant resignation, rooted buoyancy
Rating: 5 Stars

no one writing about beck being "sad" and the album being "depressing" is listening too deeply. i mean no offense here, and i even understand what they say they're hearing. but such remarks are like calling mozart's 20th piano concerto merely a "downer" for being in a minor key. to be sure, the songs expose something raw and acutely human, but beck also evinces such creation here, so much compositional joy, that from the standpoint of pure music i don't know how you can't take pleasure in the album. he plainly instructs us to do so in "round the bend," "lost cause," and at the end of "sunday sun," which closes in a fit of high-school grunge--a stout wink, no?

in no particular order, or as they come around while i listen, here are the songs. "lonesome tears," a song constructed of wrenching chord changes and subtly microprocessed fluidity, is playing right now--good god. you know the orchestral crescendo at the middle and end of the beatle's "day in the life"? well, you should hear this, which abandons straight-ahead development to just stream out into ever rising chords as unresolved as the query posed by beck's lyrics. the lyrics? 'how could this love, ever-turning, never turn its eye on me?' beck frets in a grim, doubled tenor, and then the chords come, as the song jettisons all statement of question to give us pure, lovely unaccompanied uncertainty instead. in "sunday sun" beck incorporates indian intrumentations more credibly than any song in the past 10 years, in my recollection, and what a rousing song, one that celebrates music itself. "lost cause" is on now--how does he manage such resolve while singing these lyrics? and the sound itself--unassuming, a picked guitar redolent of harpsichord like all that heartfelt schlock of the 1970's, a little glockenspeil, some basic drums, steady art-school troubadorism. ok, then there's "round the bend," an ineffable work, a string quartet in a tidal pool, a place really, with all the riches of charlie pride's "roll on, mississippi" and even that sweet standard "moon river," but torpid and creeping and drowsy in its navy blue syncopations. two middle songs, "end of the day" and "all in your mind," offer a nice reprieve between the untellable craft of the first four tracks and what follows. here beck is easy-going, sincere, pursuing an almost campfire guitar method, but with every listening these two songs grow more powerful because their art is just subtle. indeed, he ends the album in this mood, with the forward and simple "side of the road."

right now, "round the bend" is actually playing--a song that stares at you. gordon lightfoot, age 26, resides here.

"already dead" could be an outtake from "the white album," something george wrote but which they couldn't fit on the final edit. it's all picked guitar and fearless lyrics, fearless in its candor and plain conception. "paper tiger" unrolls a james brown funk with a desultory, jittering bass line reminscent of "the ox" himself, or even bootsie collins--in its verve, mind you, not that this bass player belongs in that canon. and the song sweeps with string sections that just swing and stab. often beck opens a song simply, holding its later developments in reserve, letting them establish credibility through mere honesty before he deploys his other sonic forces--forces always utterly becoming the tune, yet whose character you would never have imagined. here's "little one," which begins in stripped discord and rises through piano and jangly guitar to kyrie-like wordless voice-overs. the album opens with "the golden age," a slow piece which understands melancholy the way keats did, as a rigorous and bold experience, something you pursue with method. beck visits this country again in the sweet, big-valley twang of "guess i'm doing fine," wherein he sings of bluebirds, the moon, graveyards, and leaving the past behind--how affirmingly bare, this ascendant resignation and rooted buoyancy.

so buy this album. i have heard it 9 or 10 times this week, and it's everything i say, especially when its character unfolds after two or three listenings--though you'll be impressed on the first spin, i promise. but i vow that my praise does not derive from excitement about the cd's newness. my acclaim is not a novelty that will wear off. i haven't been this sure of an album in a long long time, nor as toppled by the attainment of such aesthetic reach. all albums make claims, but in this great volume beck seizes real territories. and in token of my admiration for its genius, i write this missive to it.

Description of Sea Change

Alternative Rock CDs

• Music > Styles
• Pop
• Rock