But Sea Change is surprisingly diverse within those parameters. ![]() There’s a consistent vibe and texture across the tracklist, a lush, impressionistic, lightly psychedelic form of downcast chamber-pop that makes Beck’s turmoil feel cinematic at every turn. His band members, all seasoned pros, made sure the music moved and breathed even when burdened by the weight of the world in particular, drummers Joey Waronker and James Gadson play with such color and pizzazz that I sometimes, against all odds, break out into a smile upon encountering their tumbling fills. (Songs like “Paper Tiger,” with its subtly funky bass groove and darting orchestral strings, seemingly presaged Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool.) Beck also recruited his father, the composer and arranger David Campbell, to slather these songs in symphonic splendor, like clouds forming into hallucinatory shapes at sunset. Crucially, he linked back up with Mutations producer Nigel Godrich, whose work with Radiohead had demonstrated his skills within dreary emotional terrain. “I don’t even try.”īeck turned to a team of trusted collaborators to translate his dejection into a vivid world of sound. “These days, I barely get by,” he laments on “The Golden Age,” as his band conjures the feeling of a drive to nowhere. It is the sound of a fog that will lift eventually, even if it seems eternal in the moment. Instead, Sea Change inhabits a levity-free headspace, an emotional state that’s unhealthy to maintain longterm but often must be passed through in the aftermath of a split in order to properly mourn what’s been lost. I’m not sure it would have maintained its impact if Beck had ever stopped to laugh at himself. Such straight-faced sorrow was key to the album’s appeal. Now, in an effort to exorcise his demons and connect with a world full of crestfallen saps, he was baring his soul without a hint of irony. Even a self-lacerating ballad like Mutations highlight “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” is vague enough to mean just about anything. After years of party-starting genre-jumble and slacker joie de vivre, you can understand why this heavy-handed sad boi routine gave some fans whiplash.īeck released some sad songs in the ’90s, but he studiously kept his personal life out of his lyrics, opting instead for the poetic and absurd. Listening straight through his discography takes you directly from “Debra” to “The Golden Age,” a song that could pass for a parody of post-breakup resignation if it didn’t sound so graceful, elegant, and sublime. The closing track, “Debra,” is an epic Prince pastiche in which he croons in falsetto about his burning desire for a threesome with a woman and her sister. He’d put out downbeat records before, most recently 1998’s Mutations, but he was coming off his most euphorically silly release to date, 1999’s cartoon disco-funk odyssey Midnite Vultures. ![]() But the album marked a sea change within his recording career too. The title presumably refers to the life-disrupting end of a relationship that spanned basically Beck’s entire twenties. The album was released 20 years ago this Saturday - during the first week of fall, as was only appropriate for some of the most autumnal music ever recorded - and even though that old adolescent longing is long gone, this music sounds as incredible today as it did back then. You know what’s not embarrassing in hindsight, though? Sea Change. It’s embarrassing in hindsight: We didn’t date that long, and it was never anywhere close to serious, but there’s no reasoning with the feelings of teenage boys. But I was weeks into my freshman year of college in a picturesque Ohio small town, still hung up on a girl who’d gone to school a thousand miles away, so the album’s exquisite desolation met me exactly where I was at. ![]() For some listeners, that deadly serious posture rendered Sea Change unbearably dour.
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