The music is deceptively simple and beautiful. The wackiness of Beck's previous efforts is gone and the blatant weirdness is replaced by an backward sincerity. Musically and lyrically, this album is very real. The music creates a soft bed upon which Beck's voice floats over, lands on, and sinks into. The vocal performance is in stark contrast to the "heartfelt" pop-vocal performances of today. Beck is whispering his sorrows in our collective ear, rather than screaming at us. It is a very bold and personal effort.

Sea Change, while not yet being called a concept album, seems to follow the appropriate rules for a concept album. The first song, "Golden Age" sets up the mood and the situation. "Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin / Let the window down / Feel the moonlight in your skin / Let the desert wind cool your aching head / Let the weight of the world drift away instead" Beck is welcoming us into his melancholy world, telling you to hold on, allow his sadness (moonlight) to touch you, and escape into his pain. Likewise, the song's instrumentation begins simply with an acoustic guitar and ends with a kind of electronic white noise.

The last song, "Side Of The Road", wraps up the journey by returning the listener to the road; the trip is over. The instrumentation is back to traditional acoustic instruments, no electronic blips and beeps. In the end, Beck tells us, "On a borrowed dime / In a different light / You might see what / The other side looks like / ...Let it pass / On the side of the road/ What a friend could tell me now" In essence, I think Beck is saying that now that you've seem my misery, know that it doesn't have to be your own experience -- in fact, you'd probably be better off letting it simply pass.

It's hard to choose a favorite song since they all kind of run into each other and maintain a consistent mood. Truth be told, every song is great, every song is beautiful. Each listen seems to bring more understanding and more insight into Beck's sadness. Immediate standouts include the opener, "The Golden Age", as well as "Guess I'm Doing Fine", "Lost Cause", "Nothing I Haven't Seen", and "Sunday Sun".

It's a great album. There is emotion in every note, every word. Behind all the pain and sadness there is beauty and possibly even joy. It's easily the best album I've heard all year and ranks among my favorites of all time. It's part Harvest-era Neil Young, part Air, with a healthy dose of Nick Cave thrown in for good measure. But all those different components come together to create something unique, something truly honest. Sea Changes is a personal look into Beck's emotions and inner thoughts. It's something that shouldn't be missed.


Sad Swinger   September 30, 2002
 25 out of 25 found this review helpful

We all know that breaking up is hard to do. Somewhere between listening to Bob Dylan's prolific Blood on the Tracks, Joy Division's beautiful "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and Jeff Buckley's heartbreaking "Last Goodbye", I think we get the point that breaking up is a real melancholic deal. So it's little surprise that Beck's new album, Sea Change, reportedly about the break up between him and his longtime girlfriend, is about as cheery as an empty house in the dead of winter. That's not to say that it's not a superb album; Sea Change is Beck's greatest album since his classic Odelay.
The album starts off with the forlorn lullaby "The Golden Age" in which he admits "These days\ I hardly get by\ I don't even try". Beck hasn't been this open since 1998's sarcastically damper Mutations, and the only song on that record to reach this kind of emotional grab was the solemn "Nobody's Fault but My Own". 96's Odelay and 99's Midnite Vultures were fantastic, but songs like "Milk and Honey", "The New Pollution" and "Hollywood Freaks" offered up little for emotional resonance. Sea Change offers up only emotion, and it's the grim type. "Paper Tiger" rides on a wavy bass line and has orchestras floating in and out of the background while Beck mumbles "There's no road back to you". The music gets a little more cheerful on "Lost Cause" but with its chanting chorus of "Baby, I'm a Lost Cause", it doesn't stray too far. But all the funky, happy rhythms that Beck has made in his career can outweigh the utter glacier chill of the heart wrenching "Lonesome Tears". Beck howls under a maze of orchestras at the chorus "How could this love/Ever changing/Never change the way I feel" in a voice that would make the reaper sob. The song is haunting and sits itself right next to your heart. The entire album hits a spot in the listener's gut where it won't come loose. In a world of mostly forgettable and redundant music, Sea Change is a gem, even if the edges cut.


Wow, like, totally, so over-hyped   September 26, 2002
 18 out of 61 found this review helpful

I don't know what everyone is raving about, honestly. Sure, it sounds all soft and mellow like a good Air record, with some Nick Drake mixed in there somewhere. . .but why not just listen to those artists' records? The lyrics are trite, the songs are boring, and the reason the music is sad is because every tempo is almost catatonic. I've always liked Beck, but without all the flashy bells and whistles of his previous releases, he reveals himself for what he is: a mediocre songwriter with a strong baritone voice and funny way of pronouncoing words.

The production sounds superb, however. Of course, with Nigel Goderich at the helm, it's going to sound fantastic. But the core of this record is a bunch of sort-of-but-not-really sad, adolescent-angsty songs that will, with any mercy, put you right to sleep.


ascendant resignation, rooted buoyancy   September 29, 2002
 18 out of 32 found this review helpful

it is fathomless and confounding how accomplished the new beck cd ("sea change") is; i find myself struggling to assimilate its achievement. the all-swallowing span of its sensibilities passes from string-accompanied funk to acoustic, california country with steel guitar and wide-open-plains vocals to dissonant discontent to a shimmering, bass-grounded soul-stream that consoles and exalts privations you never knew you suffered from. it even features glockenspeil. beck's frank, blank, heroic lyrics resound with the little private aches of all of our failed connections and the wan losses that human activity brings, yet the album never declines into melodrama; rather, it stirs with aethetic dignity and a haggard, stubborn optimism. it's an album that dylan and The Band might have made, or that mark knopplfer dreamed about, and it is as good as any album in the last 10 and more years--good as the numinous "the bends," "ok computer" and "kid A", good as "time out of mind," good as "thriller" and "wildflowers," good as Nirvana, good as "harvest moon," "brothers in arms," good as anything by the mighty wilco, or "the soul cages" (a real album, that!), or modesto's underappreciated granddaddy. just good.

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.