Beck
Sea Change
(Geffen)
Here we go again, like anxious parents waiting for our boy Beck to bring home the school report that confirms the genius we're so certain he possesses. But like all the others this effort is full of 'potential unfulfilled' and 'must try harder'. Only now the teachers have had enough of him embellishing other students' ideas. What they once wrote off as temerity is now being marked as lack of imagination.
An album that could have put Beck in the pop pantheon has left him looking solidly B-grade. Sea Change is the furthest he has stepped from the musical scavenging, vague irony and undanceable funk that made his name. He looks us in the eye as he explains the pain of a break-up, apparently his split with fiancee Leigh Limon. He wants us to disregard the starlets with whom he has since been linked. Beck's still hurtin', people, and these are the tracks of his tears.
Rather than the old bombardment of hooks, most of the new songs rely on simple, barely melodic chord progressions on acoustic guitar, washed with airy piano, strings or steel guitar. Each track sets a stage for searing confession, only to open with lines as limp as 'There's a blue bird at my window/I can't hear the songs he sings'.
