POLL: Beck, Sea Change

i thought this record was OK when it came out, haven't listened in forever. Super gorgeous production, a few sub-par songs, a kinda oppressive atmosphere. Maybe that's the point -- I always felt like listening to it was pushing me down.

http://www.xocmusic.com/misc/

"Little One" is great. The Flaming Lips did a nice (sans Beck) version of "The Golden Age" as a b-side--made it sound like an After The Goldrush/Harvest outtake.

I don't like Beck's singing on this album---I could hack the vibe at the time, the production etc., but Beck's voice was a drag, that monotonic drone. I liked "Lost Cause" enough to vote for it here.

i kinda feel like "Nobody's Fault But My Own" should be on this album, and if it were, it would be the best song on it imho

I don't like Beck's singing on this album---I could hack the vibe at the time, the production etc., but Beck's voice was a drag, that monotonic drone. I liked "Lost Cause" enough to vote for it here.

― Euler, Monday, August 29, 2011 4:57 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I feel like it works here. This is more of a mood album than a sit and enjoy anytime album. The droney-ness of it is part of the appeal for me.

I remember being hugely disappointed with this album when it came out (like everyone else it seems), mainly because the version of It's All In Your Mind paled in comparison to the (live) version released a few years before on the Bridge School Concerts Vol. 1 compilation CD. His solo acoustic performance was the highlight of that CD but for Sea Change he changed the melody/arrangement slightly which completely ruined it for me. I remember skipping over it many times but now I've grown to appreciate it in its own right. Still, Lost Cause comes out on top.

so if most of us thought this a stone bore how were so many old people wrong in 2002?

nah, this was great. sleepy, not boring.

this is a good album, agreed. and also agreed that the thurston moore album sounds an awful lot lik it. i think I prefer sea change. anyway, 'lost cause' I guess.

"Nobody's Fault but My Own"--possibly my favourite Beck song ever.

Mutations is the better record.

sort of feel like this record got a lot of really strong notices at first because it was like "beck has MATURED, now he's SERIOUS" -- but i don't think mature beck is necessarily better beck.

I loved this when it came out, still do. As others have mentioned it can seem like a slog when you aren't in the right mood, but when you are... it really nails it.

tylerw OTM - after Midnite Vultures critics seemed to want the "real" (ie serious) Beck, only this was no less mannered than anything else he'd done.

Mutations is the better record.

― a 'catch-all', almost humorous, 'Jeez' quality (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, August 29, 2011 3:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

totally.

voted sunday sun.

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"Guess I'm Doing Fine"

God this record sucks

lol

yeah Mutations is better but i love Lost Cause, especially the exhausted sounding exhalation right at the end.

also this:
There's too many people you used to know
They see you coming, they see you go
They know your secrets and you know theirs
This town is crazy; nobody cares

really nails how it feels living in small cities sometimes imho.

love lost cause

lost cause is the boring answer but the only one, every other song always melded into one slog for me

which isn't the worst thing in the world, i could see this being very useful after a teenage breakup when you specifically plan on crying yourself to sleep (making bon iver redundant)

Lost Cause is the best song on here. Yeah, ultimate breakup music. "Your sorry eyes/they cut through bone/it makes it hard/to leave you alone".

heard lost cause most recently playing in a liquor store, which made beer shopping pretty depressing.

'Paper Tiger' is fantastic. Never heard of Melodie Nelson.

if you like paper tiger, you'd probably like melodie nelson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZDDDFNHApI

this is totally "sunday sun"

Oh I didn't know it was a Gainsbourg record. Great song indeed.

no wait, it's "little one"

yeah, i don't like any of the songs, but godrich's production on that one is great

kind of funny to read my 2002 review of this record. some terrible writing aside, i think i agree with it. hadn't heard melodie nelson at the time:

For a guy who began his career with a song that had one-hit-wonder written all over it, Beck has proved to be a surprisingly durable fixture in the ever-fickle pop music landscape. By nature, he seems wholly uninterested in repeating his past successes; instead, he's crafted an adventurous and varied body of work over the past eight years, proving himself a master of innumerable musical genres and a songwriter of considerable talent. Originally pegged as the quintessential underachiever, Beck has become one of the more ambitious artists working in popular music today.

Beck's latest release, the somber Sea Change, seeks to establish Mr. Hansen as a "serious" songwriter, as someone in league with heavy hitters like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan or Nick Drake— guys who write about Serious Shit, that is. Gone are the faux r&b pastiches of Midnite Vultures and the cut and paste experimentalism of Odelay. Also gone is the surrealistic wordplay that marked even his other stripped-down affairs, One Foot In The Grave and Mutations.

What we're left with is Beck lamenting a broken heart, his acoustic guitar and world-weary voice front and center. "There's too many people you used to know," he sings on "Lost Cause." "They see you coming, they see you go." Much of the album is like this—a clear-eyed, first person report on the end of a relationship. In other words, we're a long way from the oversexed, super-funky streets of Glendale. Sorry, Debra.

Ultimately, Sea Change is a hit-and-miss affair. Beck, as usual, has done his homework: the songs here echo the best of the early '70s singer/songwriter boom. Cohen, Dylan and Drake are the most obvious touchstones, and references to Gordon Lightfoot, John Martyn and Neil Young show up as well. Beck's band, the same group of musicians who have backed him on his past two albums (the wildly disparate Mutations and Midnite Vultures), again proves itself to be a remarkably versatile and sensitive unit. Producer Nigel Godrich (best known for his work with Radiohead) gives the album a shimmering, reverb-laden sound that improves upon Mutations' slightly flat production.

But Godrich's production and the band's tasteful renderings of Beck's songs are also responsible for the album's essential flaw. Listening to the album, you're drawn more to the sonic craftsmanship at work, rather than the songs themselves. You're thinking, "Wow, what a great mix of glockenspiel and pedal steel guitar," rather than emotionally responding to the pathos apparent in Beck's lyrics. As a result, the album's central focus—the death of a love affair—is obscured considerably.

It's almost as though Beck is trying to cloak some of the rawer, more personal elements in the songs. It wouldn't be an unprecedented move. Dylan himself re-recorded much of his own broken-hearted masterpiece Blood On The Tracks in order to smooth over some of the rough edges that might have cut a little too close to the bone on the original version of the album. It's certainly the artist's right to edit and alter his own work, but in Beck's case, the beautiful but often overwhelming production of Sea Change may have cost him a better album.

In the end, the listener is left with is an undeniably gorgeous sounding record, with several excellent songs. It's not in league with the great singer/songwriter records of the '60s and '70s, but it is another fascinating episode in Beck's career. He's one of the few mainstream artists who's completely willing to eschew commercialism in order to follow wherever his muse takes him. Beck doesn't paint his masterpiece with Sea Change, but he's undoubtedly on the right track.

There's too many people you used to know
They see you coming, they see you go
They know your secrets and you know theirs
This town is crazy; nobody cares

really nails how it feels living in small cities sometimes imho.

calling Miranda Lambert!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

who's Miranda Lambert?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xjy6EuMPGA

Interesting results. It was a decent enough album but the only song that stuck with me over the years was Paper Tiger

and Sunday Sun was my close second but I can't remember how it goes

Already Dead was robbed. beautiful album.

Surprised "Nobody's Fault" isn't on this album.

lol cosign

i kinda feel like "Nobody's Fault But My Own" should be on this album, and if it were, it would be the best song on it imho

i haven't played it in several years either, but at the time i was in the midst of a mopey decade so i was cool with the vibe!

― IT IS EXECUTION (Z S), Monday, August 29, 2011 10:14 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha same here - it's also the perfect morning hangover soundtrack

― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Monday, August 29, 2011 10:43 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban

^^

"round the bend" is a stunning track imo

Round the Bend is pretty great as River Man ripoffs go

― B-Boy Bualadh Bos (ecuador_with_a_c), Sunday, August 28, 2011 11:57 AM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

comparison is apt, tho "round the bend" is more languid

if you cut like four songs from this record it would be astonishing

They're all good imho. I never understood this album's bad rep.

my problem with it is it's so one-note for so long it's a little like walking through mud

the songs are all basically good though, you're right

That's fair, I guess I've always had an inordinately high tolerance for that kind of quagmire.

They're all good imho. I never understood this album's bad rep.

― coco vide (pomenitul), Friday, March 27, 2020 10:19 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

none of the songs bang is the problem and the lane of prettiness it occupies is not everyone's cup of tea, i get it. also a lot of the songs have obvious points of comparison. its not a genre exercise so much as it is a tribute album with immaculate production.

Or, this is the point where Beck becomes unlistenable unless you have a good stereo.

the way i break down his career in my head is that sometime between Vultures and this record it sounds to me like he clearly got some kind of vocal coach or fancy pop-star singing lessons or something. his vocal technique changed so dramatically with this release & everything after, in a way that i guess is technically better but more boring imho

These songs are best experienced live, mixed in with other, more up-tempo material. The album itself is a fucking drag.

Fun Beck > Self-Reflective Beck

I liked Sea Change at the time also because it fit perfectly my personal circumstances but I never really bothered with any of his albums after that. This morning I put on Guero though and it sounded great

Those Fun Beck songs are plenty self-reflective!

Guero and The Information were good albums (though the latter would've been better had they cut it to ten tracks - the back half has quite a bit of chaff). I think those capped off a great run of albums. Since then he's kind of like Prince after Emancipation or Bowie after Let's Dance - it seems like he's more or less reached the limit of how much he can expand his work, and while his range is expansive enough that he can still make commendable records for a very long time, it's likely they won't add anything new or revealing to his recorded legacy. Maybe he'll surprise us the way Bowie did with Blackstar, but even if he doesn't, I'm glad he's still here and he still puts on great shows, just as Bowie did through his last tour and Prince did to the very end.

(For the record, I'm glad to have albums like 3121 and The Next Day and there's plenty from both that I like past their peak years. If those records didn't exist, their legacy in terms of what they accomplished wouldn't be diminished, but it would also mean less music to enjoy from two singular artists, more work that I wouldn't expect from anyone else.)

I was lucky to see a good portion of Sea Change performed live in a quasi-solo session at Northwestern a few months before the album came out. Quasi in that he had Smokey Hormel on hand and had FILLED the stage with various instruments and would chat and tell stories and then pick up a guitar, mandolin, bass, beat box, etc. and perform what felt like an improvised set list.

The Sea Change songs (unknown at the time) were transcendently beautiful in this format. One of my cherished live music memories.

Still find this record quite dull. The musical references are very on the nose. The core songs are okay, I guess, but they sound trapped in the production, like a late REM album. … Since then I feel like he's become a very Sunday magazine supplement, "what do you exist for, exactly?" kind of artist.

Too much of Nigel Godrich in general

xxp That was the show I attended. (Remember the girl who asked him to sing happy birthday? I didn't know her at the time, but we later became classmates.)

And yes, I have the MFSL CD, and it sounds amazing when you crank it up. Enormous difference, they really compressed the shit out of the standard CD. But I used to listen to the standard CD on crappy airline-quality headphones and a flimsy, cheap ass Discman that broke after a few years, and I still loved it.

Full disclosure - my favourite experience of this record was listening to the MFSL absolutely flat out, in the dark, during a huge electrical storm on a new year's eve about 10 years ago. I sat with my family (including my mid-60s parents) and we were just swept away by the drama of the whole thing. Got through pretty much the entire album without anyone saying a word. So lots of Godrich, yeah, but I'm not sure why that's a problem.

Yeah me neither. I'm sure he doesn't bat 1.000 but what he's done for Beck, Radiohead and even Pavement (albeit their weakest batch of songs) and Paul McCartney has been consistently excellent IMHO.

hard disagree, I dislike all those examples pretty intensely, but yeah this is ultimately subjective

^ all sheen, no soul

“Satan Gave Me a Taco”>>>>>>>>>>>>Sea Change

Looks like Niel Young is not happy with Beck.

https://www.stereogum.com/2200834/neil-young-takes-a-shot-at-becks-old-man-cover-appearing-in-an-nfl-commercial/news/

Hah, no surprise.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the NFL, especially after the last 20 years (the jingoistic military recruiting, the slimy way they handled CTE risks, BLM protests and even Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction) so I can't say I'm thrilled about anyone doing promos for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_X2_eN_hao

rare lonesome tears acoustic from a few weeks ago. stunning!

Despite some good songs I find Beck's voice, in earnest sad sack mode, hard to swallow over the course of an entire album.

Most boring album of all time?

yes

good songs? Like what?