When Beck broke through in 1994, Mark Richardson writes, he was seen as an artist who shuffled the sounds of the past into combinations he could call his own. “Loser” was a slide-guitar riff over a breakbeat with rapped verses and a chorus in two languages.
It came from ‘Mellow Gold.’ He released three albums that year. ‘Stereopathetic Soulmanure’ was mostly warped songs blasted with noise. ‘One Foot in the Grave’ was folk and blues, including Skip James and Carter Family covers played apparently straight.
He had started out busking in New York and getting noticed in the city’s folk clubs, so it was fair to wonder whether the simple guitar music was the one closest to his inner life.
Three attempts, spaced a decade apart
After detours through sample-based pop, Tropicália and Prince-derived R&B, he came back to folk in 2002 with ‘Sea Change’ — slow, stark material said to be about the end of a long relationship. It found him a new audience. Its de facto sequel, 2014’s ‘Morning Phase,’ won the Grammy for album of the year.
Then another twelve years of not doing it. ‘Ride Lonesome’ arrives Friday on Capitol with the same core band — Jason Falkner and Smokey Hormel on electric guitar, Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. on keyboards, Joey Waronker on drums — all of whom were prominent on both predecessors.
Beck produces it alone; Nigel Godrich, best known for Radiohead, gets credit for the mix. Richardson describes every instrument laid carefully into place like a jewel, with vocals emerging from a mist of reverb and pedal steel curling to the heavens.
The honest reservation
The review does not oversell it. Beck’s divorce from the actress Marissa Ribisi was finalised in 2021 and he has said some of these songs came from processing that. But Richardson finds the words scan well line by line without building into something profound, and they never quite seem personal to the man singing them. His conclusion is generous and precise: the record can be heard as a highly enjoyable aesthetic experience rather than a raw expression of torment, and that is not a bad thing.
The song singled out is ‘Slow Canyon’ — twangy guitar, stately woodwinds, a loping groove that feels like nudging cattle through a mountain pass on a cloudless day. “These productions are transporting on a musical level, and the lyrics are secondary.”
What to take from it
Not a lesson about grief. A lesson about repetition.
Here is an artist whose entire early reputation rested on doing something different every time, who has now returned three times across 24 years to the same austere approach with the same players. He does not improve it. He does not modernise it. He does it again, well, and then waits a decade.
The financial version is almost embarrassingly direct. The thing that works in a household’s finances is usually the thing that was working five years ago: the automatic contribution, the boring core, the cash reserve nobody talks about at dinner. It is not interesting the third time. It is not supposed to be.
‘Ride Lonesome’ is out Friday. It is a good week to hear something that is not trying to surprise you.