SEA CHANGE
Here is the tracklisting for the new BECK record, "SEA CHANGE", coming out September 24th:

01:: The Golden Age
02:: Paper Tiger
03:: Guess I'm Doing Fine
04:: Lonesome Tears
05:: Lost Cause
06:: End of the Day
07:: It's All In Your Mind
08:: Round The Bend
09:: Already Dead
10:: Sunday Sun
11:: Little One
12:: Side Of The Road

The record will come in 4 different covers, so u can choose the one u like

Peace

starbuck said:

When MJ did this last year,he was heavily criticized on this site.I think it's a cool idea though.

starbuck said:

I've had this album for over a month and a lot of people are going to be disappointed. It's basically a collection of torch songs, albeit very good songs. Those expecting funk or wierd experimentation(if you consider and album full of ballads unexperimental) are gonna be gutted.

It's an album full of ballads? Hmmm.

starbuck said:

WEIRD BECK MOMENT!!! So, I'm at the corner of Hollywood and Argyle waiting for the light to turn so I can cross the street when up pulls Beck right next to me...At first I was a bit shocked that he was in a silver BMW (I thought he was some sort of hippie type) and then to my utter amazement he begins to cry and slamming his hands on the steering wheel. Finally, the light changes and the both of us have to go but he stays there and I look back and a truck behind him is honking his horn but Beck just sits there...At this point I'm on the other side of the street and Beck is still there...truck is still honking...eventually the light changes again and neither Beck nor the truck got to go on the green...anyway I let go and kept on my walk up Argyle towards the hills. At the next light (Argyle and Franklin) I see Beck again this time driving like an asshole, speeding and taking a left turn on Franklin and up the on ramp for the 101 Freeway, at such an alarming speed that I thought he was going to flip his beemer...anyway ever since then I can't listen to Beck the same way...lol...I just can't. Living in Hollywood you always get these celebrity sightings but this was by far the strangest...Weirder than the time I saw Giovanni Ribisi at the Rite Aid buying cheap $10 dollars glasses...But whatever...Good day everyone.

TheResistor said:

Very bizarre

TheResistor said:

Are you sure you were just "walking"? I hear there are a lot of hookers up on those corners

An album full of torch ballads? I guess Beck just always leaves you guessing what he's going to do next, huh? I think he just likes so many kinds of music, and wants to do them all. I'm looking forward to this one.

Beck Sea Change

by Rolling Stone

RS Rating:4
Reader Rating:5


In 1994, Beck Hansen released his first major-label album. He called it Mellow Gold, and we all laughed at the irony: slacker caricature and coffeehouse hip-hop billed like a K-tel makeout platter. But Sea Change, his eighth album, is the real thing -- a perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open heart.
It's the best album Beck has ever made, and it sounds like he's paid dearly for the achievement. He reportedly wrote these twelve wine-dark songs after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. Significantly, two of Beck's finest songs of the last decade were also pristine love-sucks blues: "Asshole," on his '94 garage-folk detour, One Foot in the Grave, and the raga moan "Nobody's Fault but My Own," on 1998's Mutations. Sea Change, gleaming with twang and heartbroken strings, is an entire album of spectacular suffering.

This kind of candor does not come easily even to great record makers, and Beck, one of our sharpest, has never had much cause for such direct reflection. The satirical impatience and throbbing collage of his most commercial work -- Mellow Gold, 1996's Odelay, the '99 pillow-talk pastiche Midnite Vultures -- has always been more exhilarating than touching, a triumph of guarded magnificence. But you can clearly hear Beck banging between bravado and paralysis all over Sea Change. He gives his departing other a grand send-off at the start of the album, in "The Golden Age" ("Put your hands on the wheel/Let the golden age begin"), then fills the rest of the song with his own fear of going nowhere fast: "These days I barely get by/I don't even try." Compared to other titles here, such as "Lost Cause" and "Already Dead," "Guess I'm Doing Fine" is happy talk. In fact, Beck is doing anything but; the low, slow way he sings on his way to the song's punch line -- "It's only tears that I'm crying/It's only you that I'm losing/Guess I'm doing fine" -- is a powerful admission of failure.

The clarity of his crisis has a lot to do with the naked strength of Beck's singing. For someone who started out as a teenage folk hobo -- just voice and strum -- Beck has rarely walked this far out in front of the music on his own records. And considering his eternal-high-school looks, he possesses a surprisingly manly tenor, a clean, deep instrument of lust and worry. It fills the big spaces in Nigel Godrich's haunted production -- the backward-tape buzz in "Lost Cause"; the desert-Bach air of the keyboards in "Nothing I Haven't Seen" -- with the combined pathos of Nick Drake, the solo, freaked-out Syd Barrett and the John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band. When Beck and Godrich pour on the Indo-Beatles chaos in "Sunday Sun" -- ghostly pounding piano and not-so-unison guitar; a meltdown coda of drums and distortion -- you can still hear Beck's resignation and unsteady resurrection inside the song.

The Drake and Barrett comparisons are not idle flattery. Just as Mutations was Beck's homage to Tropicalia -- Brazil's late-1960s revolution in art, sound and romanticism -- Sea Change suggests that Beck has been studying the British early-1970s school of psychedelic-comedown melancholy. The coal-gray cry of string arrangements by Beck's father, David Campbell, in "Lonesome Tears" and "Round the Bend" recall Robert Kirby's exquisite orchestrations on Drake's 1969 album Five Leaves Left. Godrich, who as a producer and engineer helped put the Pink Floyd in Radiohead, shows the same flair here for shadows and suspense. Beck made this record with a full band, including guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboard player Roger Manning and drummer Joey Waronker. Yet on every song, it sounds like Beck is the only one in the room, alone with his questions and stumped for answers.

When Beck recently performed at New York's Lincoln Center, he mixed some of these new songs with breathtaking covers of "No Expectations," by the Rolling Stones," Big Star's "Kangaroo," the Zombies' "Beechwood Park" and "Sunday Morning," by the Velvet Underground. It was a perfect fit -- songs about commitment and loss, written and sung by the wounded. Beck didn't play any Dylan, but he didn't have to. As a young folk singer at the turn of the Nineties, Beck set out to be his own Dylan. With Sea Change, he has made it the hard way, creating an impeccable album of truth and light from the end of love. This is his Blood on the Tracks.

DAVID FRICKE