Thematically these ballads draw a line to Sea Change, Beck’s initial foray into heartbreak and sincerity. The results are consistently pleasant to listen to, though there’s a subtle dissonance between medium and message. Its best songs-“Chemical,” “Dark Places”-are like lullabies delivered from a space shuttle with just one person on it. songwriter Terrell Hines, undetectable vocals from Sky Ferreira and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and yet the mood remains intimate, solitary even. Along the way, there are guest verses from Pharrell and L.A. It culminates with a gospel choir bursting out of “Everlasting Nothing,” but the whole record works toward a more muted kind of celebration. During the second half of the record, the sky seems to darken and the songs bind together into a mini-suite with overlapping themes and melodies. On a trajectory more like a blockbuster film franchise, his biggest release of the decade was essentially a reboot of 2002’s Sea Change.ĭespite its missteps, the smooth, twilight sound of Hyperspace pushes him toward new territory. It’s been a long time since he successfully integrated his personality and his music. Hyperspace was previewed with a blandly conventional Amazon Exclusive set of Prince covers, an especially damning moment as it coincided with the 20-year anniversary of Midnite Vultures, Beck’s spiritual tribute to Prince. But Beck still adheres to old-school tenets of the industry: big singles, high-profile collaborations, brand partnerships. Kind of like the Flaming Lips, he has been grandfathered into the role of an eccentric major-label lifer, and, like the Flaming Lips, he occasionally wanders into the interesting-in-theory vanity project netherworld. He’s found himself in a strange position. Why isn’t Beck thriving in a time like this? If I had a laptop and SoundCloud I would have loved it.” His sentiment rings true-particularly in a year when the biggest breakout hit was a grungy, tossed-off hip-hop-country hybrid-but his use of the past tense speaks louder. “I was creating so much music and my limitation was that I didn’t have the equipment to record myself. “I would have thrived in a time like this,” he recently told NME. Maybe he imagined himself at 49 searching for a hit while rapping over distorted slide guitar and so he decided to pivot his career in every other conceivable direction, as quickly as possible. The cloying, stomp-clap single “Saw Lightning” is an outlier it’s also the type of song that might have kept Beck up at night after “Loser” threatened to turn him into a one-hit wonder a quarter-century ago. The album sounds best when they stick to the plan.
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