Beck’s First Album Of New Material Since 2008’s Modern Guilt!

Some are billing “Morning Phase” as a successor to the singer’s successful 2002 album “Sea Change” with many of the same musicians contributing to the release.

“…That album (Morning Phase), his first in five years, is “California music,” as Beck says before the show, sitting in the garden of his Buenos Aires hotel. When he makes any album, he explains, “I’m just fumbling around with chords and a mood. Hopefully something emerges.” This time, he goes on, “the songs are coming out of a California tradition. I’m hearing the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Gram Parsons, Neil Young – the bigger idea of what that sound is to me.”

“That is an apt description of Beck’s trip through the gently psychedelic suspense and warming cosmic-cowboy reflection on Morning Phase. There are combined echoes of mid-Sixties Scott Walker and Love’s Forever Changes in the slow bloom of the opening hymn “Wave.” “Blackbird Chain,” with its milky jangle and dewy strings, and the plaintive “Unforgiven” evoke 1968’s Notorious Byrd Brothers and the floating introspection of David Crosby’s 1971 classic, If I Could Only Remember My Name.”

“There are similarities in texture, velocity and personnel to Beck’s quiet 2003 masterpiece, Sea Change. Beck, who produced Morning Phase, made it with the band from the former record – the same guys on stage with him in Buenos Aires – while his father, Sea Change orchestrator David Campbell, returned to help with brass and string arrangements. But Beck is loathe to use the word “sequel” to characterize Morning Phase. “It was going back to the same place,” he says, “and seeing where we’re all at, like those Seven Up! movies, where they go back and see those people every seven years.”

“There is a fresh, expansive complexity to the grace and details on Morning Phase: the Caribbean-flavored power pop of “Blue Moon”; the strutting banjo that recalls Beck’s teenage blues-hobo years in “Say Goodbye”; the Leslie-guitar crescendo at the end of “Waking Light,” summoning the spirit of George Harrison’s soloing in the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Morning Phase also has a specific, thematic weight. All 12 songs are set in dawn’s early light, those hours of awakening and reckoning at the start of each day when a relationship can founder, end or begin anew…” – www.rollingstone.com