Primer: Beck Part 7- Sea Change

When you're going through a depression, it's hard to create anything. The few things you do manage to finish seem awful and needlessly miserable, as if the ideas are there but the energy and life are missing. You don't feel like being around anyone, and while they would never tell you this, nobody feels like being around you. Depressed people aren't fun. So one could be forgiven for thinking that Sea Change is a mediocre album because it's not very fun to listen to a guy whisper and whine about his ex and how sad the world seems. The critical re-evaluation goes something like, the album captures being depressed so well that it is, in itself, like a miserable person who isn't fun to be around.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. I have wrestled with Sea Change since its release, at first thinking it was brilliant, then boring, then awful, then merely good, then brilliant again. I wish that I could attribute my changing opinion of the album to my own changing relationship and emotional statuses, but I think it's more a matter of my being more or less forgiving of flaws. Anyway, let's be serious: Rolling Stone gave this album 5 stars and called it Beck's best album. That's enough to raise anyone's alarm.

The reason I don't like Sea Change is that it's just not that good. Not completely bad, but not that good. It begins with the overstuffed, suffocating production (this is the only time I think Nigel Godrich made an album worse instead of better) and ends with the scattershot songwriting quality. The album begins and ends well with the pristine melancholia of 'The Golden Age' and the stripped down, acoustic 'Side of the Road', but in between the songs are a very mixed bag. The strings on 'Paper Tiger' add nothing to the song and are mixed way too high. Similarly, the overblown and bloated 'Lonesome Tears' has schmaltzy strings and feels like it goes on for twice as long as it does. 'Lost Cause' is really good, with its fingerpicking guitar and Beck's voice right up front and all the ancillary swirls of sound and synthesized touches relegated to the background. Similarly, the added elements to the re-recorded 'It's All In Your Mind' (released a few years earlier as a stripped down single) emphasize the emotional impact of the song. The album's most surprising and successful moment of depression and stuffed production comes in 'Round The Bend', a freefloating string-led dirge. Unfortunately, 'Little One' piles on instruments during the choruses, going for the obvious when it should, I dunno, try something else. I genuinely like the parts of this song that don't go the easy route, though it's here that I want to make mention of the fact that I think this album is one of Beck's poorest as a vocalist. As we've established, this is his sad sack album, but his delivery of lyrics is often mumbled, muffled, or just generally drained of any creativity or emotion. Nick Drake and Elliott Smith recorded a lot of sad albums, too, but their vocals were often the biggest draw.

I would almost wager that, as time goes on and people reevaluate Beck's discography, Sea Change will be understood as the mediocre and overproduced album that it is. Blood on the Tracks, an album of bummed out, post-breakup catharsis (whether you believe it was personal or not), was highly praised on release, and reevaluations of Bob Dylan's music have kept it toward the top of the pile. I don't see this happening with Sea Change. My opinion has varied wildly about it over the years, but now it's settled, hourglass-style, into a half empty/half full glass.