Beck's Morning Phase

CALIFORNIA STYLE

Beck mines a different sort of mellow gold on Morning Phase

by Matt Ashare |  

Published February 26, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

In his latest mutation, Beck embraces a kind of grand moodiness

The new Beck album — his twelfth overall, and first for Capitol — is not an illustrated book of sheet music. It’s not a delivery device for the three buoyant, stand-alone singles — “Defriended,” “I Won’t Be Long,” and “Gimme” — that the mercurial singer-songwriter released last year, after his nearly twenty-year contract with Interscope-affiliated DGC label had run its course. And, it actually doesn’t quite open with a wistful Beck reflecting on the scattered remains of days past, waking up from “a long night in the storm,” eyeing “roses full of thorns,” wondering aloud, as the plaintive refrain of the quietly unsettled “Morning” plainly asks, “Can we start all over again?” 

         No, the meticulously laid-back, bittersweetly romantic, organically rendered Morning Phase begins, in concept-album fashion, with a brief orchestral overture, a rising swell of a string section (violins, violas, cellos) touching on some of the more dominant, minor-key musical motifs of the album in the 41 seconds of “Cycle.” Only then do we catch a glimpse of Beck’s acoustic guitar, leisurely strummed, as the first song settles into a languid, deliberate groove, with restrained drums and atmospheric keyboard touches that, along with orchestral embellishments, help conjure the peaceful, uneasy feeling that pervades Morning Phase.

         It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we’ve washed up once again on the lovelorn shores of Sea Change, the quietly introspective 2002 album a wounded Beck recorded in the wake of a jarring break-up of a nine-year relationship. And, while that’s not entirely inaccurate, it does miss some of the finer points — some of the nuance in an album that’s driven by subtle shifts of mood — of Morning Phase.

The Beck that surfaced on Sea Change, raw and freshly wounded, was an artist in search of a different kind of mellow gold. It was a Beck who seemed out of step with the slacker savant who, with hip-hopped hits like “Loser” and “Where It’s At,” had made cut-and-past eclecticism his calling card, and, in a delightfully postmodern twist, turned novelty songwriting into an incisive commentary on the art of the novelty number. Through crafty juxtaposition and freely associated wordplay, he proved a master at creating the illusion of depth, or, more accurately, at using allusion as a meaning unto itself to craft hearty party anthems that, upon closer inspection, deconstructed the whole notion of the anthemic party.

Even when he set the sampler aside on 1998’s Mutations, he proved to be a genre omnivore, artfully sampling, in a larger sense, from Brazilian tropicalia, psychedelic folk-rock, and countrified comforts without fully committing to any one musical or tonal framework. So, for all its lovely shadings, Sea Change couldn’t help but seem a bit heavy handed in its adherence to a one theme, one mood, and a whole lotta tangled feelings. It was, ultimately, an album with emotional baggage. And that was just the sort of thing that the freewheeling Beck hadn’t packed on his previous excursions into the pan-cultural pastiche of hip-poppery, or into the the lo-fi, neo-Dylan realm of the acoustic anti-folk that preceded his “Loser”-fueled 1994 breakthrough album Mellow Gold.

Beck has been through a number of, well, might as well call them mutations over his two-decade career, essentially splitting time between electro-charged hip-hop and r&b on the one hand, and more organic, folk-oriented soundscapes on the other. But, he’s tended to remain refreshingly restless even when working within a particular genre — his Princely, soul-stacked, and masterfully funked-up 1999 album Midnite Vultures is a testament to that particular aspect of his artistry. That’s also why many of Beck’s detractors have tended to view his more extreme stylistic swings as elaborate hipster in-jokes, and his penchant for merry eclecticism as an unwillingness to commit.  Morning Phase may not dispel those notions, but it goes a long way toward demonstrating a level of maturity and follow-through that haven’t been high on Beck’s list of musical priorities in the past. And yet, it does so without settling into the monochrome blue mood of Sea Change, by finding beauty, comfort, and disarmingly charming melodies in free-floating sadness.

Those are qualities that casual fans aren’t likely to associate with Beck, but Sea Change is an album that embraces modest, and perhaps even hard-won grandeur, that frankly isn’t afraid to be lovely in a downcast sort of way. It’s intimate, without being cloying. And, while it does stick to a certain subdued palette — slow- to middling tempos, acoustic guitars, ethereal reverb, lush but not quite ornate strings — it moves freely through a range of folk-rock idioms, touching on the light-pshychedelia of the Beatles and the Byrds, deploying heavenly vocal harmonies reminiscent of vintage Simon & Garfunkel, stumbling down a few of Americana’s “lost highways” (as Beck alludes to in the fingerpicked “Heart Is a Drum”), and landing squarely on the hazier side of the California-style of folky rock. There’s even a little bluesy swagger in “Say Goodbye,” a slow-thumping rumination on mortality that, like much of Morning Phase, is less confessional than meditative.

Morning Phase may not have been six years in the making, but it is Beck’s first album since 2008’s more characteristically diverse Modern Guilt. Not that Beck’s been idle over that time — along with unrecorded sheet-music album in the form of 2012’s Songbook and last year’s singles, he’s been producing other artists (Charlotte Gainsbourg, as well as fellow alt-rock travelers Thurston Moore and Stephen Malkmus), and writing material for soundtracks and video games. Along the way, he’d also been hinting that he had a couple of very different albums in the works. Morning Phase, with its casual intensity and insinuating melodies, is one of those albums. If the past is any indication, the next one will almost certainly be something totally different. That’s just how Beck rolls.