Pitchfork

It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a new song every day on a beat-up four-track; absorbing Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and old school hip-hop with equal enthusiasm. The aptly titled "Loser", his biggest and most career-defining hit, was recorded in a friend's living room for kicks. His first live performances were on hijacked mics at other peoples' gigs: he'd just step up with a guitar or harmonica between acts and entertain while the often bemused next band set up their drums. On the homemade tapes and scrapped-together compilations that comprised his earliest recorded output, Beck cobbled together all of his influences-- noise, hardcore, country, rap, folk, grunge, R&B, found sound and classic rock-- and melded it into his own junkyard punk.

Over subsequent releases Beck continued to refine the art of juxtaposing achingly poignant folk songs with lo-fi guitar freakouts, collages of dialogue and noise, and Radio Shack hip-hop. With Odelay he managed to pull all of these disparate elements together in an artful way, blending nimble dobro guitar figures, say, with sample-heavy backbeats, vocal samples, banjo, a loop of Van Morrison covering Bob Dylan-- bottles and cans, or just clap your hands. At live shows, or on Chris Douridas' morning program at KCRW, Beck would often play never-recorded songs he'd likely composed just a few days before playing them, exquisitely voiced and effortlessly brilliant.

What happened to that guy?

Mutations, the genteel quickie Beck recorded on the cheap in 1998, was largely a knee-jerk reaction to the daunting task of ever having to follow up Odelay at all. His label even reneged on a provision that allowed him to release records on independents, and it's little wonder: with Mutations, shit-hot producer Nigel Godrich had crafted a slick, almost clinically glossy record, with clean guitars that never buzzed or hit bum notes. And while "Cold Brains", "Nobody's Fault But My Own", and "Canceled Check" are great songs, lesser tracks like "Lazy Flies" and "We Live Again" were shamelessly gussied-up with tired space-rock bleeps and whooshes-- and I won't even get into the made-for-Starbucks faux-exotica of "Tropicalia". No offense to Pitchfork alum Neil Lieberman, who praised the album mellifluously, but in 2002 we're up to our asses in "futuristic roots albums". Let's call Mutations what it was: a soft-rock One Foot in the Grave made with Pro Tools and a heart of steel.

Perhaps it's telling that his seventh studio album is titled Sea Change-- for rather than the smooth, utterly inoffensive quirks of Mutations, Beck opts for abrupt changes in temperament and lush instrumentation. Recording again with Godrich and his regular band (Smokey Hormel, Roger Manning, Joey Waronker, and Justin Meldal-Johnsen) pounding out a track a day over an intense two-week period, Sea Change rightfully feels like a sequel to Mutations with no alarms and no surprises. In fact, opener, "The Golden Age", would feel right at home on Mutations itself, with its gentle mid-tempo strumming, lonesome wails of pedal steel and predictable space-rock flourishes.

A cloud of mind-numbing melancholy hangs over Sea Change, from the world-weary grandpa-Beck voice he employs on most of the tracks to its unfailingly morose lyrics. "These days I barely get by/ I don't even try," Beck sings in "The Golden Age", and that's just the tip of the jagged iceberg that looms ever larger in Sea Change's periscope. It's obvious just from perusing the song titles-- "Lonesome Tears," "End of the Day," "Already Dead," "Lost Cause"-- that the 2002 model Beck is one sad sack (and it's impossible not to armchair quarterback which of Beck's celebrity girlfriends inspired such gut-wrenching bile). But though the songs are jam-packed with typical Beck imagery (stray dogs, moonlight drives, diamonds as kaleidoscopes) there's very little here that measures up to the eloquence of "She is all, and everything else is small."

It's pretty obvious what Beck is shooting for with Sea Change: that timeless quality that his heroes Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake seemed to exude with every recording. But here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols. Too often Beck saddles these songs with half-baked cliches and easy rhymes: "sky" always rhymes with "die", "care" always rhymes with "there". He doesn't even sound like himself on many of Sea Change's more paint-by-numbers cuts. On "Guess I'm Doing Fine" Beck emotes in an unnatural croak that's likely the product of a digitally decelerated vocal track, but he mostly just sounds constipated. Likewise with the karaoke-honed Gordon Lightfoot impression Beck turns in on the hoary "End of the Day": "It's nothing that I haven't seen before/ But it still kills me like it did before."

Elsewhere, Beck mines Mutations' folky space-rock vibe with more artful and ear-pleasing results. The chiming guitars and groaning strings of "Lost Cause" creak and sway like the tired masts of a pirate ship; washes of backward sound snake through the melody like restless ghosts. "The Golden Age", with its chorus of tinkling glockenspiels and cavernous echo, is a pleasant diversion in the vein of Mutations' "Cold Brains." An unnecessary remake of 1994's "It's All In Your Mind" is tarted up with the omnipresent synth blips and drums, but some tastefully distant banjo licks and Suzie Katayama's swooning cello lend the song a resigned majesty the original certainly never portended.

But it's Sea Change's most daring tracks that are ultimately its most satisfying. Beck's father, David Campbell, contributes inventive string arrangements to three cuts: "Paper Tiger" is a low-key triumph, with a minimal bed of bass and drums punched up by sudden, deep string attacks-- Beck's "Glass Onion," if you will; the deliciously overwrought "Lonesome Tears" is an uncomfortably raw display of emotion, with an unpredictable melody and unbelievably tortured chorus ("How could this love, ever-turning/ Never turn its eye on me?" Beck questions as the song builds to a cathartic tsunami of violins and ear-splitting noise); the moody, cinematic "Round the Bend" cribs the cadence and nocturnal vibe of Nick Drake's "River Man", augmented by plucky upright bass and Beck's subdued, almost intentionally slurred vocal.

But Cap'n Beck saves his strangest songs for the second half of the album, with the enigmatic "Sunday Sun" bathing odd, disjointed lyrics ("Jealous minds walk in a line, and their faces jade the strain") in a Brian Wilson-inspired glow, with mixed but cosmetically acceptable results. The unsettling sea shanty "Little One" is a return to form, with a fetching minor-chord hook and creepy lyrics ("Cold bones tied together by black ropes we pulled from a swing") intoned in a convincing Kurt Cobain growl.

He knots it all together, sorta, with the anticlimactic closer "Side of the Road", which plods along awkwardly amid busy slide-guitar work and a rambling electric piano. It's a far cry from the back-porch perfection of "Ramshackle", but given what it reveals, it'll do. "Something better than this, someplace I'd like to go," sings Beck in a tremulous voice seemingly decades beyond his 32 years. "To let all I've learned tell me what I know/ About the kind of life I never thought I'd live."

On Sea Change, Beck sounds intentionally world-weary, but it's the songs themselves that sound labored. Is it no longer enough for Beck to write profound, genre-bending tunes that stand on their own? Does he really need the crutch of suffocating overproduction and bold strokes of orchestration to shock us into caring again? Two turntables and a microphone, man!

'Cause there was a time when Beck didn't need Nigel Godrich to space out his white-collar blues. A winter spent in Calvin Johnson's basement, an afternoon spent with a beatbox and a slide guitar in a friend's living room was all he needed to pluck otherworldly songs from the fertile Beckscape of desolated views, crazy towns, lost causes and stolen boats. Given how much soul-searching obviously went into this record, it's distressing how little soul the finished product actually has. If there's anything the self-absorbed murk of Sea Change illustrates with unmistakable clarity, it's that Beck has forgotten how to connect with his inner loser-- and it's nobody's fault but his own.