Album: Beck

Sea Change, Geffen

As with Gabriel's Up, Beck's Sea Change is the kind of album that gets called "personal", full of bitter observations on matters which remain essentially private, their opacity unrelieved by sombre orchestral arrangements that recall the darker corners of the late David Ackles's oeuvre (a mournful songwriter who made Leonard Cohen seem like a full-on party animal). It has already been compared to Dylan's Blood on the Tracks for the way it apparently rakes over the debris of a shattered relationship, with lines like "Lonesome tears, I can't cry them any more/ I can't think of what they're for/ And they ruin me every time" and "Already dead to me now/ 'Cause it feels like I'm watching something dying". Beck here seems exhausted, drained of passion and self-belief, crushed by an emotional cataclysm so all-enveloping that he can't see beyond it: "One road back to civilisation/ But there's no road back to you", as he notes in "Paper Tiger". Musically, the album is about as far removed as Beck could get from the electro-funk of Midnite Vultures; the album it most resembles is Mutations, except that here, the country-rock settings to songs such as "Golden Age" and "End Of the Day" have a more haunted, melancholy tone, akin to an enervated Eagles. The whine of pedal steel guitar creeps round the songs like bindweed, while instrumental details – the sad tinkle of glockenspiel, a few terse stitches of lead guitar – struggle to overcome the glum, amorphous strings that haunt Beck's reverie, implying a Nick Drakean dislocation with the world. Uneasy listening, perhaps, but not entirely unrewarding.