Music Arcades: Beck: Sea Change

At the time all the reviews I saw said this was a great album. They also signalled it was a new tack after the rich seam of Mellow Gold had, arguably, been over-mined. That was enough for me to reboard the bandwagon, after sitting out — you know — the Big Hits. Lucy has at least one of those and says I'm just being snobbish by eschewing them. The very thought!

Sea Change still seems to have a good reputation. I remember emailing Gideon Coe a year or two back and saying that I'd never really spent enough time with the album, and he said it would be worth my while. But then he likes all that alt country stuff (I reckon the BBC are grooming him as the Gen X Bob Harris, but that's another story), which generally sounds a bit shapeless to me.

So part of me wants to say, "It's not you, it's me". Maybe if I sat down and tried really hard, listening properly to the lyrics. But the lyric sheet is close to illegible. Why does that happen so often? Do the artists or the label give the designer a brief that says "make it look like we're including the lyrics as an extra benefit but then hold back the benefit — you know, ignore the fact that the lyrics are words and just render them as one more graphic element." That's another another story.

The other part says, "Nah, it's emperor's new clothes." So I checked the list of reviews on Wikipedia, and most of them are, as I said, very positive. I hunted down the unconvinced ones and agreed with Maddy Costa in The Guardian that the "intriguing burrs and squiggles provide the only element of surprise in these songs; otherwise, they drift somnambulistically into each other", and could see why Robert Christgau said, "when the most impressive thing about slow songpoetry is the string writing, somebody doesn't have his heart in it".

From what I read about the backstory to the album, Beck presumably did have his heart in it, but it hasn't moved mine yet.