POLL: Beck, Sea Change

after the 3rd or 4th song with that same tinkly synth sound my eyes glaze over, wld much rather hear becks guitar playing most of the time

Paper Tiger and Lonesome Tears are both really good, for different reasons. In my deep madness of Beck superfandom I bought the Japanese import CD, and "Ship In the Bottle" is a pretty good song too. Lost Cause I don't care for.

The melancholy is effective, the sadness is not. Maybe it's too maudlin for me to hear it as authentically sad? The strings sweeten things up so much that it doesn't feel stark or lonely, it feels like watching a pops orchestra in a thunderstorm.

Yeah there’s a bit of that. It came out when I was in the midst of a breakup so I really prepped myself to get nicely crushed by it but ultimately it kinda felt artificial. Still some great songs. Soft spot for « Guess I’m Doing Fine » for its Hank Williams references

Oh yeah the songs are great, aside from Lost Cause. And the production is really lush. Nigel and Beck's dad really pulled through. When I'm sad, I'm more likely to hit up One Foot In the Grave-- there's a picture in the liner of Beck by himself in a room with no furniture and linoleum from the '50s, playing guitar in a rickety chair wearing a couple layers of flannel and a wool beanie like the room is neither furnished nor heated, and that's kind of what the album is like.

https://www.stereogum.com/2200152/sea-change-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/

Where has the time gone?

"round the bend" is a stunning track imo

― majority whip, majority nae nae (m bison), Friday, March 27, 2020 10:14 AM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

m bison otm, also display name hall of fame

Some interesting facts:

I met you...at JC POLLney - ILM Artist Poll #97 - BECK - the Results Thread

27. Guess I'm Doing Fine (my vote in this poll but not my first pick in my Top 25, was 25)
30. The Golden Age
31. Lonesome Tears
34. Lost Cause
36. Paper Tiger
45. Sunday Sun
47. Little One
51. It's All in Your Mind
121. Already Dead
129. End of the Day

"Round the Bend" and "Side of the Road" didn't get a vote

democracy doesnt work

I saw a few shows of the tour with Flaming Lips as backing band and while they often had a weird mismatched energy I still remember “Round the Bend” was always a stark & stunning highlight of each gig. Wish I’d found room for it on my ballot.

saw them on that tour also. Beck had gotten food poisoning before the show and managed to still bust moves during the Odelay/MV tracks. My tour shirt from that is still somewhere iirc. Beckon the paining exists?!?!

One of my first concerts was the "solo" tour he did before the album came out. Smokey Hormel actually joined him for a good part of the set (maybe even most of it), but otherwise it was Beck doing a lot of songs that I never heard him perform before - unveiling stuff from Sea Change but also covers that could've laid the groundwork for it like Big Star's "Kangaroo," John Lennon's "Love," Hank Williams's "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle" (maybe another of his songs too), the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning," etc. One of the best shows I've ever seen, and I even met him after the show with a bunch of other fans - talked to us for like 20 minutes and he couldn't have been nicer and more charming. That alone made me a fan for life. Bought the album the day it came out and it's still one of my very favorites.

awesome! i would spend hours sifting through his website, which was incredibly detailed during that era (setlists, lyrics, unreleased tracks, etc.)

It really was a great website. IIRC you could even stream high quality videos, which was a pretty big deal - this was before YouTube which either hadn't started up yet or hadn't become widely used. I remember the video for "Hell Yes" debuting on Beck's site - that was great, partly because it was the 8-Bit remix (aka "Ghettochip Malfunction") which I liked more than what was later released on the album.

I saw that solo tour too and yeah it was an all-time favorite gig for me as well, have always wished for a high-quality bootleg from one of those shows but I don’t think I ever found one. I remember he opened with a version of “No Expectations” that was just incredible

Still a boring-ass album.

Some people find Nick Drake boring too. Not everyone gets it.

I'd have picked "Little One" - eye-opening chord progression, finally some power in the instrumental arrangement, and in the chorus Beck finally projects his voice so it doesn't get stuck somewhere in his chest. But I considerably prefer Morning Phase to this album. Even Modern Guilt - same mood, but with some wit and with an appealing economy of means.

Would kill to hear 21st century Beck do one of these acoustic songwriter albums that is actually fully stripped down and acoustic, an album of live-in-the-room tracks that all sound like “Sing It Again” from Mutations. but idk, with his production sensibilities it seems unlikely these days

I kind of wonder if he's done it already and it's sitting on the shelf. When the revelations about the Universal fire leaked out, Beck mentioned that he had a lot of stuff stored at Universal:

"I negotiated 20 years ago to try and get control of my masters. I wasn’t willing to go to war for it, but it’s something I’ve asked many times. I wish that I had been able to make copies...there are dozens and dozens of reels of all kinds of songs and ideas that never got finalized or finished that should have seen the light of day sometime, but probably won’t...In 2001, I went into the studio and recorded 24 Hank Williams covers and did a whole double-album of solo covers of Hank Williams gospel, honky-tonk songs. It was something I did maybe a year before I did Sea Change. That’s probably lost. Probably a lot of others. I have tape cassettes of things like that around, but as far as masters they’re probably gone.” (Less than a day later, he posted on IG: "Since the time of that interview we have found out that my losses in the fire were minimal.")

Last night at the end of the Sunday Night Football game Beck was in some sort of promo where he was covering Neil Young "Old Man." It was sort of strange and Chris Collinsworth seemed to love it.

Found some info about it here: https://pitchfork.com/news/beck-covers-neil-youngs-old-man-for-sunday-night-football-promotion-listen/

Hm. Different strokes, etc. The idea of an acoustic "sincere" Beck album then and now chills me.

I like Mutations because he still infused the material with a Cohen-esque chansonniere attitude.

Beck trying to get guys whose favorite song is the Nationwide Insurance jingle weepy about Tom Brady might be the hardest a man has ever fallen off.

I don't like this record too much, have always preferred uptempo Beck, but the tour I saw after the Lips tour, whatever/whenever that was, was totally great. He sat down for a while and got mopey with some of these tunes but it worked in the larger context.

scanning this thread, nobody mentions that this is his "I'm sad because the Scienti's made me break up with my gf" album?

one foot in the grave, sea change and mutations are his best shit cmon yall. theres an amazing set from kcrw from around this time and he does a john martyn song it rules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vISP65Lwuew

And here's what you're looking for if you want a high quality boot with the lips its fuckin great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViMlk6MM0Xc

Old man has the same arrangement as the original, minus the banjo and JT and Ronstadt. Why bother?

Some of the Flaming Lips arrangements remind me of the slower Minneapolis recordings on “Blood on the Tracks” in the way they brought a sweeter and sprightlier touch to the songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O76x2OydAp8

Can’t find it but I remember the new Flaming Lips arrangement of “Get Real Paid” being especially good.

Whole ACL episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn-23rJudi8

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. I know he got popular again in the mid-2000s, but this is the last Beck record I felt motivated enough to buy on its release date. Since then I feel like he's become a very Sunday magazine supplement, "what do you exist for, exactly?" kind of artist.

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