FEATURE:
Second Spin
Beck - Sea Change
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IT may seem odd…
PHOTO CREDIT: Wendy Redfern/Redferns
to include a Beck album in Second Spin. This feature highlights albums that are underrated or under-played. In terms of the latter, I don’t think Sea Change gets as much airplay as albums like Odelay (1996) or Midnite Vultures (1999). There are a couple of other reasons why I wanted to spotlight Sea Change. I think that it was underrated upon its release. Most reviews were positive, but there were a few more mixed. Such a stunning and personal album, Sea Change deserved even more than it got. I don’t think many people know Sea Change that well. Maybe they do not know beyond singles like Guess I’m Doing Fine. The final reason I am spending time with Seas Change is the fact it is twenty on 24th September. Many will mark the twentieth anniversary of one of Beck’s most important and best albums. If you look at Beck’s discography, Sea Change arrives sandwiched between two quite vibrant and eclectic albums. Sea Change’s title is quite apt, as Midnite Vultures is a full of different sounds and textures. You only need to look at the strange and neon front cover to know that this album was going to be quite wild, strange, bright and hypnotic! Similarly, Guero has that mix of sounds and styles. With a more composed and less bright cover, it was released three years after Sea Change. Similar to Odelay in the way it fused varied genres, Beck clearly needed to be more personal and deeper with his eighth studio album, yet he returned to something a little more experimental and bolder on Guero.
Interestingly, 2014’s Morning Phase sort of mirrored a lot of the emotions and themes from Sea Change (Beck felt that Morning Phase was a companion piece to Sea Change). Maybe critics who were not sold on Beck’s 2002 album were reacting to his past work and how much of a departure this was. Tackling themes of heartbreak and desolation, solitude, and loneliness, this was the freewheelin’ sonic maverick actually creating something more mature, soul-bearing and personal. I think there was confusion and a bit of disappointment from some. Even though Sea Change did get a lot of love, it is disappointing that some were a bit cold. I am going to end with a couple of the positive reviews, in the hope of convincing those who have not heard Sea Change to listen to it. There are a couple of features I want to highlight. The first, from Guitar.com, is a fascinating 2021 article that discusses the genius of 2002’s Sea Change:
“As musical swerves go, the one Beck made between 1999’s Midnite Vultures – a tongue-in-cheek day-glo mashup of soul, funk and Prince – and 2002’s Sea Change – a collection of introspective, heartbroken acoustic-guitar songs – takes some beating. Yet the detour wasn’t entirely without signposting; Beck had revealed a more subdued, traditional-folk side to his songwriting on 1998’s Mutations and glimpses of it before that, saying in an interview at the time of Sea Change’s release: “There are threads of what I’ve done before. If you listen to my earlier B-sides, you’ll hear this record. I have been wanting to make this record for years.”
While some critics had become increasingly irritated by Beck’s eclecticism, there was to be no burying of his singer-songwriter aspirations beneath layers of genre-hopping sonic trickery with Sea Change. The record links its songs together into one coherent sonic atmosphere throughout – quite an achievement, considering it was masterminded by an artist who rarely sounds the same for two bars, let alone 12 songs. The album’s consistency was helped by Beck’s reliance on a trusted core band of musicians including bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, drummers James Gatson and Joey Waronker, keys player Roger Joseph Manning Jr and guitarist Smokey Hormel, with the basis for many of the tracks being recorded live in LA’s Ocean Way studios.
Americana Godrich
As well as producing Mutations, producer Nigel Godrich had recently overseen Radiohead’s transition from guitar-centric alt-rock to expansive, electro-influenced art-rock between 1997’s OK Computer and 2000’s Kid A. For Sea Change, he was entrusted with taking Beck’s sound in the opposite direction: away from the futuristic kaleidoscope of electronic influences that collided on Midnite Vultures, to focus Beck’s manic imagination on crafting sonic details around a bedrock of more traditional, performance-based instruments.
The sound of the room, the production and engineering decisions, the quality of the playing and the obvious work that went into the arrangements all play their part in making Sea Change an incredible-sounding record. From the majestic strummed acoustic that opens the record onwards, it’s often cited as a benchmark hi-fi recording, with huge dynamic range between its punchy low end and warm and ethereal reverbs. Throughout, the nuances of Beck’s bitter, lovelorn vocal performances in particular are captured perfectly, making him seem to whisper confessionally in your ear.
While the songs are intentionally simple and direct, the orchestration of instruments and effects is anything but. This is probably why Sea Change was compared on its release to artists with very little in common aside from their mastery of melancholy, with critics drawing comparisons to Nick Drake, Syd Barrett, Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, among others.
Strumming the heartstrings
We’re here to talk guitars, of course, and Sea Change uses the six-string to its fullest to create atmosphere and intensify the emotional charge of the songs, employing everything from clean acoustic picking to effects-lathered experiments to convey the message.
Opener The Golden Age defines the soundscape: naked strummed guitars contrast with ghostly vocal reverbs courtesy of Ocean Way’s studio plates, while pedal-steel-esque licks, glockenspiel and flickering washes of effects, organ and gritty country-electric lines flare up and drift away into the distance”.
In 2020, Udioscovermusic.com observed how Sea Change was Beck finding new maturity for the new millennium. Rather than continue with the lyrical and sonic persona many knew him for, this was a real break that took many by surprise:
“A new openness in Beck’s lyrical approach was certainly in plain sight, largely devoid of the whip-smart irony that had been his trademark. From the acoustic opener “The Golden Age” onwards, it was matched by an affecting simplicity and directness in the song constructions themselves, sometimes elegantly illustrated with lush strings.
Beck’s album contained such titles as “Lonesome Tears,” “Lost Cause” and “Already Dead,” as well as the reflective “Guess I’m Doing Fine.” It was far removed from the rambunctious verve of “Where It’s At” or “Sexx Laws.” “Forlorn folk,” The Guardian called it. But when he spoke to writer Paul Lester for that newspaper, he typically chose not to show his hand about the album’s emotional motivation.
“I don’t talk too much about my personal life,” he said. “You’ll get a thousand times more of me from my music than anything I could say in an interview. When you start opening yourself up in that way, it cheapens your life.”
The album was introduced by the engaging lead promo track “Lost Cause,” followed as a single by “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” which had a video directed by Spike Jonze. Sea Change was every bit of the gear shift that its title implied, but many of Beck’s admirers were eager to make the leap of maturity with him.
The long player peaked at No.8 in the US, made the top ten in his stronghold of Scandinavia and was a Top 20 success in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. It went on to sit comfortably inside the Top 20 of Rolling Stone’s list of the best albums of the 2000s.
Playful on tour
After some shows early in 2002 and an appearance in the spring at the Coachella Festival, Beck teed up the LP release with an August tour of the US. There was certainly no trace of glum introspection when he arrived at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, as MTV reported.
“Beck’s two-hour acoustic performance had a playful vibe throughout,” wrote Christina Fuoco. “He filled the show with sly remarks, showing a different side to his flashy, leisure-suit-wearing self. The concert was a free-for-all, with fans shouting out names of songs in hopes that Beck would perform them.
“Sporting jeans, a white button-down shirt, Converse sneakers, dishevelled hair and rosy red cheeks, Beck cracked jokes the minute he hit the stage, which looked like an unkempt music classroom.” The show featured a guest appearance by Jack White, who joined Beck on “Cold Brains” and a version of “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” by their mutual inspiration Robert Johnson.
Laughing and joking with the audience and cracking up as he attempted to play “Sissyneck,” Beck eschewed most of his more beat-driven hip-hop flavors. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do the hip-hop thing live,” he said. “I’ve been studying LL Cool J’s Unplugged for 15 hours straight. I have not figured [it out]. It’ll come to me.”
A song every two days
Beck told Record Collector that the Sea Change sessions resembled those with Godrich for Mutations. “It turned into a song every two days,” he said. “Mutations we recorded and mixed in two weeks, this was probably three and a half but we got a little more ambitious I think, because we had orchestral arrangements and different musicians coming and going.”
The sessions took place at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles. “It was a reunion of sorts,” he said. “It was something we’d been planning for four years, talking about. 9/11 happened and then people weren’t working as much, I think we originally wanted to do this record a year and a half ago, but it took a while for people to line up.”
The record repaid that perseverance, just as it continues to reward repeated listens. Beck followed its release with another North American tour in the autumn that included two nights at the Beacon Theatre in New York and another at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA. The album went gold in America in 2005; the sea change had been completed to great effect”.
Let’s end with two positive reviews for the incredible Sea Change. As it is twenty on 24th September, it is a perfect time to reassess and re-explore a masterful work from one of music’s innovators and most remarkable artists. AllMusic had a lot of love reserved for Beck’s Sea Change when they reviewed it:
“Beck has always been known for his ever-changing moods -- particularly since they often arrived one after another on one album, sometimes within one song -- yet the shift between the neon glitz of Midnite Vultures and the lush, somber Sea Change is startling, and not just because it finds him in full-on singer/songwriter mode, abandoning all of the postmodern pranksterism of its predecessor. What's startling about Sea Change is how it brings everything that's run beneath the surface of Beck's music to the forefront, as if he's unafraid to not just reveal emotions, but to elliptically examine them in this wonderfully melancholy song cycle. If, on most albums prior to this, Beck's music was a sonic kaleidoscope -- each song shifting familiar and forgotten sounds into colorful, unpredictable combinations -- this discards genre-hopping in favor of focus, and the concentration pays off gloriously, resulting in not just his best album, but one of the greatest late-night, brokenhearted albums in pop. This, as many reviews and promotional interviews have noted, is indeed a breakup album, but it's not a bitter listen; it has a wearily beautiful sound, a comforting, consoling sadness. His words are often evocative, but not nearly as evocative as the music itself, which is rooted equally in country-rock (not alt-country), early-'70s singer/songwriterism, and baroque British psychedelia. With producer Nigel Godrich, Beck has created a warm, enveloping sound, with his acoustic guitar supported by grand string arrangements straight out of Paul Buckmaster, eerie harmonies, and gentle keyboards among other subtler touches that give this record a richness that unveils more with each listen. Surely, some may bemoan the absence of the careening, free-form experimentalism of Odelay, but Beck's gifts as a songwriter, singer, and musician have never been as brilliant as they are here. As Sea Change is playing, it feels as if Beck singing to you alone, revealing painful, intimate secrets that mirror your own. It's a genuine masterpiece in an era with too damn few of them”.
In 2002, Rolling Stone gave Sea Change five stars. Listening to the album now, and it still has that ability to get under the skin and really provoke emotions! Such a brave release from an artist who was very much expected to repeat Odelay and Midnight Vultures, Sea Change was a much-needed shift from Beck:
“In 1994, Beck Hansen released his first major-label album. He called it Mellow Gold, and we all laughed at the irony: slacker caricature and coffeehouse hip-hop billed like a K-tel makeout platter. But Sea Change, his eighth album, is the real thing — a perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open heart.
It’s the best album Beck has ever made, and it sounds like he’s paid dearly for the achievement. He reportedly wrote these twelve wine-dark songs after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. Significantly, two of Beck’s finest songs of the last decade were also pristine love-sucks blues: “Asshole,” on his ’94 garage-folk detour, One Foot in the Grave, and the raga moan “Nobody’s Fault but My Own,” on 1998’s Mutations. Sea Change, gleaming with twang and heartbroken strings, is an entire album of spectacular suffering.
This kind of candor does not come easily even to great record makers, and Beck, one of our sharpest, has never had much cause for such direct reflection. The satirical impatience and throbbing collage of his most commercial work — Mellow Gold, 1996’s Odelay, the ’99 pillow-talk pastiche Midnite Vultures — has always been more exhilarating than touching, a triumph of guarded magnificence. But you can clearly hear Beck banging between bravado and paralysis all over Sea Change. He gives his departing other a grand send-off at the start of the album, in “The Golden Age” (“Put your hands on the wheel/Let the golden age begin”), then fills the rest of the song with his own fear of going nowhere fast: “These days I barely get by/I don’t even try.” Compared to other titles here, such as “Lost Cause” and “Already Dead,” “Guess I’m Doing Fine” is happy talk. In fact, Beck is doing anything but; the low, slow way he sings on his way to the song’s punch line — “It’s only tears that I’m crying/It’s only you that I’m losing/Guess I’m doing fine” — is a powerful admission of failure.
The clarity of his crisis has a lot to do with the naked strength of Beck’s singing. For someone who started out as a teenage folk hobo — just voice and strum — Beck has rarely walked this far out in front of the music on his own records. And considering his eternal-high-school looks, he possesses a surprisingly manly tenor, a clean, deep instrument of lust and worry. It fills the big spaces in Nigel Godrich’s haunted production — the backward-tape buzz in “Lost Cause”; the desert-Bach air of the keyboards in “Nothing I Haven’t Seen” — with the combined pathos of Nick Drake, the solo, freaked-out Syd Barrett and the John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band. When Beck and Godrich pour on the Indo-Beatles chaos in “Sunday Sun” — ghostly pounding piano and not-so-unison guitar; a meltdown coda of drums and distortion — you can still hear Beck’s resignation and unsteady resurrection inside the song.
The Drake and Barrett comparisons are not idle flattery. Just as Mutations was Beck’s homage to Tropicalia — Brazil’s late-1960s revolution in art, sound and romanticism — Sea Change suggests that Beck has been studying the British early-1970s school of psychedelic-comedown melancholy. The coal-gray cry of string arrangements by Beck’s father, David Campbell, in “Lonesome Tears” and “Round the Bend” recall Robert Kirby’s exquisite orchestrations on Drake’s 1969 album Five Leaves Left. Godrich, who as a producer and engineer helped put the Pink Floyd in Radiohead, shows the same flair here for shadows and suspense. Beck made this record with a full band, including guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboard player Roger Manning and drummer Joey Waronker. Yet on every song, it sounds like Beck is the only one in the room, alone with his questions and stumped for answers.
When Beck recently performed at New York’s Lincoln Center, he mixed some of these new songs with breathtaking covers of “No Expectations,” by the Rolling Stones,” Big Star’s “Kangaroo,” the Zombies’ “Beechwood Park” and “Sunday Morning,” by the Velvet Underground. It was a perfect fit — songs about commitment and loss, written and sung by the wounded. Beck didn’t play any Dylan, but he didn’t have to. As a young folk singer at the turn of the Nineties, Beck set out to be his own Dylan. With Sea Change, he has made it the hard way, creating an impeccable album of truth and light from the end of love. This is his Blood on the Tracks”.
Twenty years after this masterpiece album was release, and I am reading reviews that are quite middling or not that convinced. Maybe there should be some retrospective assessment as Sea Change has been frequently voted as one of Beck’s defining albums. I think that the brilliant, beautiful and successful Sea Change (which reached the top twenty in the U.S. and U.K.) is fully worthy of a new take and wave of affection. This is an album undervalued by some that really does deserve…
MUCH more love.