For an artist as prolific and shapeshifting as Beck, five-plus years is a long time to wait between records. But in the time between 2008’s Modern Guilt and now, Beck has said that he was suffering from a serious back injury that prevented him from performing or even playing guitar for long. And yet, the inventive songwriter and producer seemed to keep himself more than busy: He produced albums for artists like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus, and Dwight Yoakam; he and pals like St. Vincent, Wilco, and many more covered classic albums in his Record Club project; and he dropped a whole book of sheet music with Song Reader.
Still, news of a new Beck album not only excites fans, but also inspires them to guess which mode he’ll be operating in: Will it be “Dance Party Beck” of Odelay and Midnight Vultures and The Information or “Introspective Beck” of Mutations? But that’s the fun part: Album-to-album, you never know which side you’ll get. Case in point: Following last summer's trilogy of funky, electronic-based singles, Beck’s once again going acoustic and delving into darker, inward-looking territory with Morning Phase.
The capsule-sized through-line on Morning Phase is that it's something of a spiritual follow-up to Sea Change, both in tone and musicians. The album, now streaming in its entirety over at NPR Music before its release on Feb. 25, reassembles Beck’s Sea Change-era band including Joey Waronker, Smokey Hormel, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., Jason Falkner, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and Beck's father, composer David Richard Campbell, who again provides string arrangements. The result is a thoughtful, yet down-tempo collection of lush and spaced-out folk songs.
Members of the Soundcheck team took Morning Phase for a short test drive around the block and have these first impressions.
Morning Phase is Beck at his least fun. Not that this is a bad thing; it’s just that if you’re looking for the Beck who wrote “Loser” or “Where It’s At,” he ain’t here. This album is already drawing comparisons to Sea Change, Beck’s introspective breakup album from 2002, and I can certainly understand why. This album isn’t gloomy, though. There are lots of colors, many courtesy of Beck’s dad, the composer and arranger David Campbell, whose orchestrations are lush without being overripe, and others the result of Beck’s own ear for the possibilities of a modern studio (listen to the impossible piano sound on “Unforgiven,” for example).
Still, this is not a record that leaps out and grabs you right away. I was kind of on the fence until “Blue Moon,” five tracks in. That was the point where the album’s emotional core began to reveal itself, and I began to think I’d want to listen to this album again. Which I have not yet done -- otherwise this wouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction, would it?
Standout track: “Wave,” for its haunting vocal, accompanied only by string orchestra. (John Schaefer)
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Beck opened for Wilco and Bob Dylan this summer at Jones Beach, playing a great deal of Sea Change in an acoustic set. It was an instructive set, if Morning Phase is the “sequel” to that record. Where Sea Change is an undeniably down-tempo affair, the 2013 live versions of “The Golden Age,” or “Lost Cause” had, well, spunk. There was no question that Beck was having a ball on that stage. As an artist that has spent two decades cultivating a distance -- call it ironic or no -- from his audience, it seems a bit like that wall is beginning to disintegrate on Morning Phase. It’s in Beck’s voice: the way one or two vocal tracks run comfortably in parallel, then -- “this morn-innnnnng” -- carom off each other and scatter into golden, multi-register harmonies that Sea Change could only grasp at. It’s in the atmosphere: Where Sea Change seemed to be about someone singing cold comfort to himself in a closet, Morning Phase throws the windows open and (dare we say it in February?) lets the spring air in. It’s in the arrangements: “Thanks for the bitchin’ strings, Dad!”
Standout track: “Blue Moon” sounds like something off of Automatic For The People; “Turn Away,” wherein Beck channels his inner Garfunkel. (Dan O'Donnell)
The first time I listened through this album, I’m embarrassed to say the image that kept coming to my mind was a totally clichéd cinematic one: a person laying on their bedroom floor, staring at the dust motes floating in a hazy ray of light. Calm on the surface, but inside that person’s head, you just know there’s some deep, life-changing shit knocking around. This isn’t the bouncy Beck that I hummed along to on road trips in college -- but I like this side of Mr. Hansen just as much. For the first go-around, it was nice to just let the sonic heaviness of this album wash over me. But I’m really looking forward to listening again, and getting to know these songs in a more personal way.
Standout track: "Blue Moon" (Katie Bishop)
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Like Dylan or Miles, Beck has always been an iconoclast musician who prefers moving forward rather than looking back. But in a recent interview on All Songs Considered, Beck described what it felt like to reconvene ten years after Sea Change, with his same band, and to pick up the same guitar that for years he was unable to play due to injury, and make music again with old friends. There’s something inspiring in getting a chance to simultaneously revisit the past while catching up and discovering how much life has occurred in the interim.
While Morning Phase shares a tone with that masterful 2002 album, its tone is neither rehash nor nostalgia tour victory lap. This is something new. Still, I thought about that interview when listening to this record for the first time: How can you not hear those opening chord strums and transcendent chiming melody of “Morning” as an inversion and extrapolation of Sea Change songs “The Golden Age” and “Guess I’m Doing Fine?" And as the album rolls on, I find myself ruminating about where I was when I first heard Sea Change more than ten years ago, and looking forward to how much I plan to listen to this latest album in the years to come.
Standout track(s): "Morning," and "Waking Light" (Michael Katzif)