Cause For Alarm
beck's long-awaited come back conjures Sea Change in the form of a ruminative mood piece
written by K. Ross Hoffman peter
Even without the knowledge that it was recorded with the same musicians as 2002’s beloved Sea Change—or its widely circulated pre-release description as a“companion piece” to that record—Beck’s new LP all but demands a direct comparison. Album opener “Morning” is a dead ringer for Sea Change pace-setter “The Golden Age,” with the same ambling lope (just a hair drowsier), a nearly identical, languidly strummed chord progression and a correspondingly placid, glockenspiel-kissed riff.
Rather than heralding the dawn of a shining new age, though, here our man is simply waking up, ruminating idly on regret and redemption: “Won’t you show me the way it could have been?” runs the airy, aching falsetto chorus. While a song-for-song head-to-head between the two albums doesn’t play out beyond that blatant initial parallel, the sonic and tonal similarities are, simply put, indisputable: Fans of the earlier LP’s lush, ponderous moody blues will feel instantly at home. Not that this is a wholesale rehash.
While Sea Change was a richer, more cinematic affair than the stripped-down troubadour set it’s sometimes remembered as, Morning Phase heads considerably further down that road. Beck, who’s had plenty of production practice in recent years, ably takes the reins here, filling the album’s crannies with an expanded, lavishly layered instrumental palette—mandolins and perky organ peeps on “Blue Moon”; pedal steel and baroque woodwinds on “Blackbird Chain”; traces of harp on “Unforgiven”—and lightly psychedelic flourishes (spacey washes, ghostly descants, phasey vapor trails) that occasionally push it into the densely atmospheric terrain of 2008’s Modern Guilt (minus the drum loops).
Then there’s Beck’s dad, veteran arranger David Campbell, whose work graced not only Sea Change (and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”), but also many of the very 1970s California folk/rock LPs—by Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Gene Clark, among others—that are clear touchstones for both albums. His orchestral charts play a crucial role here, especially on ominous, sinuous, sonorous centerpiece “Waves,” a haunted ballad with echoes of “Unravel” and “Pyramid Song” (to cite two of Beck’s art-pop contemporaries) and maybe the most distinctive thing here.
These loving, nuanced details of sound and arrangement are where Morning Phase really shines. Where it can’t help but pale by (inevitable) comparison is in the songs themselves. Sea Change was, unabashedly, a break-up album, which helped give it a focus, clarity and emotional resonance unlike really anything else he’s done. This one has a cogent unifying concept—every song is ostensibly set in the early morning hours—but despite promising “a symbol of your exegesis in a full-length mirror,” it rarely scans as specifically relatable, or even particularly legible.
Beck’s marvelous 2012 sheet-music Song Reader—his most inventive and compelling work of the last decade—demonstrated his ability to craft simple, succinct, emotionally affecting songs has, if anything, only grown since Sea Change. Yet nothing here even approaches the poignancy and directness of “Lost Cause” or “Guess I’m Doing Fine”—at least writing-wise. Instead, Morning Phase is ultimately a mood piece: a quiet triumph of feeling over form. It’s a resolutely lowkey offering; a smaller, more delicate record than the circumstances (Beck’s first LP in six years!) perhaps suggest. But it’s a fond, heartfelt celebration nonetheless.
Rather than heralding the dawn of a shining new age, though, here our man is simply waking up, ruminating idly on regret and redemption: “Won’t you show me the way it could have been?” runs the airy, aching falsetto chorus. While a song-for-song head-to-head between the two albums doesn’t play out beyond that blatant initial parallel, the sonic and tonal similarities are, simply put, indisputable: Fans of the earlier LP’s lush, ponderous moody blues will feel instantly at home. Not that this is a wholesale rehash.
While Sea Change was a richer, more cinematic affair than the stripped-down troubadour set it’s sometimes remembered as, Morning Phase heads considerably further down that road. Beck, who’s had plenty of production practice in recent years, ably takes the reins here, filling the album’s crannies with an expanded, lavishly layered instrumental palette—mandolins and perky organ peeps on “Blue Moon”; pedal steel and baroque woodwinds on “Blackbird Chain”; traces of harp on “Unforgiven”—and lightly psychedelic flourishes (spacey washes, ghostly descants, phasey vapor trails) that occasionally push it into the densely atmospheric terrain of 2008’s Modern Guilt (minus the drum loops).
Then there’s Beck’s dad, veteran arranger David Campbell, whose work graced not only Sea Change (and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”), but also many of the very 1970s California folk/rock LPs—by Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Gene Clark, among others—that are clear touchstones for both albums. His orchestral charts play a crucial role here, especially on ominous, sinuous, sonorous centerpiece “Waves,” a haunted ballad with echoes of “Unravel” and “Pyramid Song” (to cite two of Beck’s art-pop contemporaries) and maybe the most distinctive thing here.
These loving, nuanced details of sound and arrangement are where Morning Phase really shines. Where it can’t help but pale by (inevitable) comparison is in the songs themselves. Sea Change was, unabashedly, a break-up album, which helped give it a focus, clarity and emotional resonance unlike really anything else he’s done. This one has a cogent unifying concept—every song is ostensibly set in the early morning hours—but despite promising “a symbol of your exegesis in a full-length mirror,” it rarely scans as specifically relatable, or even particularly legible.
Beck’s marvelous 2012 sheet-music Song Reader—his most inventive and compelling work of the last decade—demonstrated his ability to craft simple, succinct, emotionally affecting songs has, if anything, only grown since Sea Change. Yet nothing here even approaches the poignancy and directness of “Lost Cause” or “Guess I’m Doing Fine”—at least writing-wise. Instead, Morning Phase is ultimately a mood piece: a quiet triumph of feeling over form. It’s a resolutely lowkey offering; a smaller, more delicate record than the circumstances (Beck’s first LP in six years!) perhaps suggest. But it’s a fond, heartfelt celebration nonetheless.