Beck marks maturity with a more elemental sound on new album

By the time Beck Hansen finished his lush, melancholy new record, Morning Phase, he had become so consumed by the process that he says he'd suffered brain damage.

"I've heard each song about six or seven thousand times, to the point where it's burned a hole, neurologically, in my auditory system," the songwriter says.

Recorded in Nashville, Los Angeles, Paris and London over seven intense months, Morning Phase is the 43-year-old artist's 12th album and his first studio album since he hit 40 - and it sounds like it. This is a record that a successful man with a wife and two children, like Beck, would make. It's also one in a line of records that he's crafted, the best known being the west coast cool-rock classic Sea Change from 2002, that rein in his beat-based, oft-funky/funny electronic jams in favour of more traditionally arranged American music.

Beck had his breakthrough 20 years ago when he scored a pre-viral viral hit with the single Loser, and his major-label debut, Mellow Gold, went platinum. He followed that with, among others, the critical breakthrough Odelay and an odd experiment in funk with Midnite Vultures. Then he broke up with a long-time girlfriend, made Sea Change, quietly acknowledged an affiliation with Scientology stretching back to his youth, expanded into bleepy electronics with Guero and The Information, married actress Marissa Ribisi and had children, and tried to reconcile the lot of it on Modern Guilt.

"I spent the last few records trying to develop, or create some sort of continuity with earlier records like Odelay and Mellow Gold," he says. "I purposely wanted to have songs that worked with those live. 'People like those other records? Well, maybe they'll like this.' So I've tried to cultivate that, but I wouldn't say that that was my natural instinct."

After working at reconciling his many aesthetic interests - and becoming a free agent upon concluding a long business relationship with Geffen and owner Universal - Morning Phase is a stab at purging his songs of everything but "the most essential, elemental sounds", Beck says.

"I think we can all accept that acoustic guitar, and a piano, and an upright bass and acoustic drum and strings - they're things that are elemental. I felt that for the songs to have a kind of particular quality, something that feels like it breathes or has a warmth to it, that those would be the most suited." Beck would offer a bare rendition, often on guitar, that the band would then manifest and augment.

Add a touch of banjo, pedal steel, oceans of string arrangements by his father, David Campbell, a languid voice - on many songs multi-tracked to sound as if dozens of Becks are harmonising - and the result is one slow drift of melodies and arrangements that morph and chime over the course of the album.