![]() 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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