Album review: Beck

Song Reader

Beck’s disillusionment with the rock industry reached its apex last year, when he released his new ‘album’ as a volume of sheet music. Beck was returning from ill-health and was known to be unhappy with the relatively poor sales of his recent records, so ‘the album’ seemed the ultimate shoulder shrug: an eccentric gesture of little use to fans craving new material (inevitably, it was released in conjunction with the home of trying-too-hard quirkiness, publishing house McSweeneys).

What was not known, at the time, was that Beck was at work on a comeback LP proper, the seductively downbeat Morning Phase (where he stares middle age in the eye and concludes growing old may not be the end of the world).