Released on the heels of a lengthy, six-year hiatus and billed as a “companion piece of sorts” to his lauded, intensely personal eighth studio album, Sea Change, Beck’s Morning Phase certainly arrives with high expectations. Steeped in a different strain of melancholia than that of his aforementioned breakup opus, Morning Phase offers the seasoned perspective of a much wiser individual. Here, Beck is more concerned with the broad existential philosophies considered over a solitary cup of coffee than the tangled intimacies of human relationships.
Following the hurried ’60s psych-pop of 2008’s sorely underrated Modern Guilt, Beck subsides to simple folk melodies and gorgeous string instrumentation to build the sweeping soundscape of Morning Phase, best imagined as the aural reconstruction of an introspective Sunday drive down California’s Gold Coast, groggy eyes plagued by blinding rays of light and all. Take the aptly-named second track “Morning” — its tender piano and warm chimes evoke the slow wash of first light from sunrise, complimented by a pedal steel guitar.
While the album’s thematic ambitions may, at first, come across as a bit direct, the layered vocal arrangements on Morning Phase add resonance to Beck’s contemplative lyrics. The first single, “Blue Moon,” is a ready example of this. The song — complete with “oohs” and “aahs” — is some of the most straightforward pop Beck has ever written, yet the seemingly constant movement of its echoing vocals gives it a psychedelic twist. “Cut me down to size so I can fit inside / Lies you try to hide behind your eyes” he sings in a variation of the chorus, providing simple self-reflection in an otherwise daring criticism as the song morphs through an array of instrumental personalities.
For an album so clearly being pushed as another “sad Beck” collection, Morning Phase offers a surprising amount of optimistic pop music. “Heart Is a Drum” boasts another exceedingly catchy melody stemming from a swirling piano line and strong acoustic guitar, while “Country Down” borders on Hall & Oates sing-a-long territory. The album concludes with “Waking Light,” perhaps the most lyrically complex and musically confident track of the set. “No one sees you here, roots are all covered / There’s such a life to go and how much can you show? / Day is gone on a landslide of rhythm / It’s in your lamplight burning low” Beck sings, summing up a day’s worth of doubt in just three lines — the perfect endcap to a volume of self-examination.
What is it about a clear morning that feels so soothing? It seems Beck has tapped into that mysterious emotional experience by successfully revisiting the bottom-of-the-bottle feeling of Sea Change with a reinvigorated, quiet sobriety on Morning Phase. As a musician known for constantly reinventing himself, Beck’s willingness to return to such territory marks a maturation that only few artists’ careers ever live to see. And with that maturity comes perspective — a revelation that, as Morning Phase concludes, can be as simple as the music itself.
Review by Shea Garner. You can follow him on Twitter @sheaDUCK.
