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 ...

Check out our album review of Artist's Sea Change on Rolling Stone.com.

Beck has crafted a meditative masterpiece of powerful resonance.

<p>(Geffen) </p>