Every ecstatic thing you've heard about Beck's despondent Sea Change (released on DGC this past Tuesday) is true and deserved, except for one major point. Although this masterful CD will convince you that he has lately had a rough love life, the sea of salty tears that now buffets this paradigmatic postmodernist is in no way a truer medium than the carefree artifice he once spun to earn his fame. If anything, in these troubled and uncertain times, it's a slight letdown.

That might seem a contradiction -- no cliché rings truer than "misery loves company"-- but then, Sea Change is built on a contradiction. On the surface, this plainspoken, heartfelt album consummates Beck's early promise to become pop music's last great modern folkie. Yet in achieving this natural mastery, the recording is thoroughly dependent on a far deeper layer of synthetic pop trickery. There's nothing wrong with that -- brilliant musicians from Nick Drake to John Lennon to Alex Chilton honed that same paradox on their singer-songwriter masterpieces in the '70s. But for Beck, this move marks a retreat from a sophisticated level of honesty about artifice, a level never quite reached by Drake, Lennon, and Chilton, not to mention legions of lesser heartstring pluckers lamenting their losses in coffeehouses and bars before and since.

Maybe that's fitting: Sea Change is all about retreat anyway. According to a widely published LA rumor, the withdrawal began when Beck accidentally read an amorous e-mail intended for his girlfriend, designer Leigh Limon. The 12 songs that resulted from the ensuing break-up have a narrow emotional scope that's as uncharacteristic of Beck as is their pose of grim sincerity. I mean, just check out the unrelenting song titles: "Lonesome Tears," "Lost Cause," "Already Dead." It should be too much, yet Beck creates a varied and impassioned album about numbed and featureless depression by subtly varying the arrangements and the production that convey this purple malaise. Some of the credit must go to producer Nigel Godrich, who last worked with Beck on his only other downer disc, 1998's Mutations. But here Beck allows Godrich to come closer to the latter's fabled work with Radiohead, as even the warmest and most predictable chord changes ride on an undercurrent of stressed technological noise that hums, clicks, and buzzes against the folksy flow in restrained protest.

And the closer you listen, the more the layers of musical depth reveal themselves -- it's like seeing schools of fish materialize one on top of another in the murk of a placid lake. Even the album's sequencing is brilliant, with clusters of alterna-country tracks broken up by single urbane outcroppings like the ghostly dirge "Paper Tiger," the almost up-tempo pop tune "Lost Cause," and the positively noirish "Round the Bend," a grand wash of spooky fog fit for a David Lynch soundtrack. It all neatly climaxes in the dramatic, oddly discordant diptych "Sunday Sun" and "Little One."

This mastery is partly that of a full crew of talented and experienced musicians. Yet Beck still sounds alone, like Lennon on his bare-bones Plastic Ono Band, Drake in his forlorn excursions under a pink moon, or Chilton in his last desperate recording as part of Big Star, Third/Sister Lovers. In fact, that sense of isolation was endemic to the entire male half of the 1970s' singer-songwriter movement, as emblematic a slice of the Me Decade as any. These days, this narcissistic tradition can be most clearly heard in the screaming self-pity of new metal, a tone the pain posse misappropriated from grunge. In Beck's early days, he offered a glorious corrective to that tone, transforming the loser 'tude of Generation X into a sardonic badge of pride. But now he moans and mumbles in the style he once half-mocked, sounding like a cross between Eddie Vedder and the frog-man dude in Crash Test Dummies.

And by way of adding insult to his sense of cosmic personal injury, Beck shortchanges one of his greatest talents -- the way he puts surprising words together -- for the comforts of banal imagery ("There's a blue bird at my window," etc.). The price of this retreat is most keenly felt on the second cut, "Paper Tiger": the song is shot through with echoes of September 11, yet the imagery resolves in a coda -- absent from the lyric sheet -- that muses, "There's one road to the truth/There's one road back to civilization/But there's no road back to you." And from there, Beck's pain becomes a bland abstraction, a cipher with no object. Yes, it's an impressive cipher, but, after that "helter-skelter morning," don't you feel alone enough already?

Issue Date: September 27 - October 3, 2002