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Beck | Sea Change

The great techno-acoustic album some of us have been dreaming of.
CD, Geffen/Interscope

Tekst: Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Publicatiedatum: 19 september 2002

"We saw shadows of the morning light
The shadows of the evening sun
Till the shadows and the light were one."
(Jane's Addiction - Three Days)

Beware of those careless words tossed around. Disbelieve your first impressions of a treacherous simplicity, a return to old values. Already we can sense the arrogant mantra with which you will be told that the boy has finally channeled his talent into following in the footsteps of Gram Parsons and Neil Young. I am already bored. For once, try to forget this game of playing with the pieces of influence. The introverted music on Sea Change should not come as a surprise: Beck always has worked according to a dialectic of acoustic simplicity and a postmodern kaleidoscopic sound. But something does surprise. It would be seductive to see in Sea Change a triumphant appearance of The Real Beck. But are simplicity and loneliness the true signs of authenticity? Do they not form another mask behind a mask, so subtly that it cannot be distinguished from the real? Better to let this question rest; if someone is always unreal, it eventually becomes the real. In the case of Beck, he remains in flux, vague, indefinitive.

That Beck returns with such a strong work is maybe the easiest way to be surprised. Beck's credit in the pop cultural stakes seemed to have disappeared when the decade, of which he seemed such a telling symptom and clever chronicler, faded away into something new and uncertain. The over-praised Odelay did signal this slow decline into uselessness. The emperor's new clothes, a betrayal of a promise. To his credit, it was something he seemed aware of, if the album cover was to be believed: Beck as the cute, somewhat eccentric dog doing his boring trick. Nowadays, Beck still seems aloof, incapable of transmitting something like believable feelings of love (or lust — at one level he still remains a prepubescent boy), yet his music isn't without a core of feeling: melancholia — Sea Change breathes it, flowing from a source of disappointment with people, cities, and culture. Quite the opposite of Mellow Gold, which captured the happy-go-lucky zing of the early nineties, Sea Change feels narrow.

Of course the title explains a lot: Sea Change, a radical turn, perhaps as a hint of artistic maturation, a turning away from the tired silliness and unconvincing Prince simulacra of Midnite Vultures. Even so, Beck remains too much of the eternal boy to pull that trick off. To get to the center of the album, one must see its title as a new chapter in a geographical myth based around the relationship between Los Angeles and the Pacific. L.A. as the End of the West, the eternal dying moments of expansion, the folding of modern man at the final beach, when there is nowhere left to go. At one level, Sea Change is permeated with a feeling of sadness as a product of seeing every frontier collapse. Let the golden age begin . . . I don t think so.

The edge called L.A. is haunted by a dazzling light and inhuman darkness, which fascinates Beck on the album: The Golden Age observes that the sun don't shine, even when it's daytime; and Paper Tiger homes in on its darkest myth, with mentions of a Helter Skelter morning. The great Los Angeles artists have always wrestled with light, darkness, and emptiness emanating from the edge, and they basically form two strategies to deal with it. First, as with such diverse artists as the Beach Boys, Black Flag, and Slayer, they become conscious of the gaping wound, and subsequently fold away into extreme defense mechanisms of love, self-loathing, and hate. Second, there are the visionaries (Jane's Addiction, The Doors), who try to look beyond the edge for some victory for man. Beck seems to be caught between both strategies; Sea Change dreams of willful isolation (tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause), and an escape into the open, in order to never return.

The same goes for the music, which follows two distinct templates: semi-acoustic songs with a slight country influence, and opulent symphonic rock in the most obvious sense of the word. With their soaring arrangements, Lonesome Tears, Sunday Sun, and Little One have an immediate impact, helped by some memorable melodies. But be careful; The simplicity of Sea Change's other tracks is treacherous. After repeated listens, a depth of surface is revealed, and an extremely subtle, technological layer, almost out of conscious hearing, appears. The ways the effects have been worked into the grain of the song are probably the most astounding feature of the album. It's mysterious, giving the songs a sense of being haunted. Hanging out with Air has done the boy good. The result is the great techno-acoustic album some of us have been dreaming of. A Kevin Ayers for the 21st Century.

2002. Labyrinthine. Protean. Spectral. The wasteland crowded with talent, in search of a lost map telling of a way out/forward. Our shadows point in different directions.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/beck/sea-change/1872/
Meer Beck op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/beck