Beck fuses joviality and melancholy into his new album

Photo by Jon B, via flickr

Luis Santana/Opinion Director 

If you’d have told me that in 2014 Beck would put out a psych-folk album that I would immediately fall in love with, I would have laughed in your face.

Beck seemed to me the quirky black sheep of the early 2000’s. I remember having one of his songs pre-loaded into my HP desktop when I was about eight years old. To top it off, I had heard “Loser” and “E-Pro” so many times that those songs and his voice were the bane of my existence.

Beck’s newest album “Morning Phase” is what emotion, if it were tangible, would feel like. Sometimes lighthearted, other times brooding; Sometimes loose and other times thick but always feeling fluid and never leaving you unsatisfied. There’s a feeling of fullness to the songs as well. Each one fills your ears and mind and never do you think that something is missing from any of the songs.

The album starts off with “Cycle” a track that is composed entirely of strings accompanied and synths. The song paints the picture of the world waking up for the first time and as smoothly as a river melds into the next track, “Morning”

If “Cycle” is the music to the suns ascent into the sky, then “Morning” is you and I waking up. The orchestral instrumentation in the background is similar to the score of (500) Days of Summer with its chiming bells and accordion creating a celestial feeling. Though jovial in nature, the lyrics are melancholic. Beck croons, “Can we start it all over again this morning? I lost all my defenses this morning Won’t you show me the way it used to be?” You begin to realize as I said earlier, that while the songs sound light-hearted, there is a brooding darkness behind them.

The single “Blue Moon” is where this album shines and resembles psych-folk groups like Renaissance. Beck starts the song with “I’m so tired of being alone, these penitent walls are all I’ve known,” bringing another melancholic arrow into this song. The jangling banjos and drumming on this song keep it from being bogged down in sadness. Another song on the album, “Say Goodbye” also deals with breaking up, and Beck seems to be harping on this breaking up most of the album.

The album seems to slow down in “Wave” when it just becomes a dark over-driven synth song but it isn’t totally distasteful.

Ultimately, “Waking Light” brings the album back to where it came as Beck sings, “When the morning comes to meet you, Open your eyes with waking light.” “Morning Phase” seems to me to be an album that you will like at first, and will continue to grow as the lessons that Beck tries to show become more relevant in our lives. We wake up again, we regret what we did, but we go on living hoping to grow out of the penitent walls that we’ve known and into the waking light of finding love.

luis.santana@fiusm.com

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