Sea Change
On Beck Hansen’s fifth album, you can feel the meticulous layers of his unique musical approach—the absurdist lyrics, the hyperactive audio collage, the wry post-modernism—falling away. Made amid the wreckage of his breakup with long-term partner Leigh Limon, *Sea Change* is just that: a directional shift to emotionally raw balladry. “The Golden Age” evokes dawn-lit desolation, while “Guess I’m Doing Fine” wrings an affecting acoustic miracle from an almost bottomless melancholy.
It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a ...
Beck has always been known for his ever-changing moods -- particularly since they often arrived one after another on one album, sometimes within one song -- yet the shift between the neon glitz of Midnite Vultures and the lush, somber Sea Change is startling, and not just because it finds him in full-on singer/songwriter mode, abandoning all of the postmodern pranksterism of its predecessor.