Beck is one of those unfortunate artists who have produced an impressive body of work but nevertheless have never made one truly great
album; everyone seems to love
Odelay the most, and it's pretty good, but the songwriting on that record isn't Beck's best and the production kind of overwhelms it. The general opinion on
Sea Change has been pretty varied; at the time it was hailed as a masterpiece, a
Blood on the Tracks for our time, then people started to back away from it, and now people like it again. I would say that song-by-song this is the best album Beck's ever made; I always find it impressive when somebody manages to wrangle something new out of the old Nick Drake formula, and in almost every track here there's some line or some bit of business that manages to be interesting. There are some truly excellent string arrangements here, and while "Round The Bend" is most impressive in that respect the Serge Gainsbourg tribute "Paper Tiger" is also very well arranged. The problem is that this sort of record is supposed to hit you emotionally, and this one doesn't. It's all very distant and cold to me, without one-tenth of the emotional power that a Will Oldham or a Jason Molina or a Chan Marshall or a Michael Gira would have been able to bring to the table. Beck is not exactly a relatable figure; he works better as a freaky whiteboy spaceman-type; he's closer to David Bowie than Bob Dylan in my mind. So what we've got here are some great songs that are nevertheless hamstrung by Beck's inability to make them connect. The album works best when Beck indulges his pop side: "Little One" and "Sunday Sun" are both great pop songs, and it makes me wish the whole album were more like them. But it isn't, and even though he's trying hard, he just can't make this connect with me.
MY RATING:
7.7
Beck - "End of the Day"
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