Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#16)

16) BECK – Sea Change (2002)

Beck’s Sad Bastard album. But don’t you dare call this a breakup album. Don’t you fucking dare. Yeah, there’s bluebirds at the window, lonesome tears, “Sunday Morning” xylophones, “She’s Leaving Home” violins and mumbling-blues vocals. But, like any true artist, Mr. Hansen knows that this personal feeling of loss is merely a jumping-off point for the transcendental (Freud’s sublimation) in a way that’s similar to two of my other favorite so-called breakup albums: Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood and Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. Beck though, unlike Fish and J. Spaceman, doesn’t need drugs to accomplish this. If those albums represent the first night of debauchery after you get The Call, then this is the morning after—when you realize that, yeah, the whole sex-with-regularity thing was great, but you weren’t getting it all that often any more, and you really were sick of Desperate Housewives Season Four and that god damn Jack Johnson album she forced you to listen to all the time. Suddenly you remember all those numbers you have stored in your phone, and that cute girl who works the front desk at your office, and you think: maybe I can take this whole sad-sack bullshit and run with it. Or, like Dave from the pawn shop says, “Chicks are into lonely guys—it’s a psychological analogy.” So don’t go saying that this is a breakup album, or that it’s “sad,” or even that it’s about moving on with your life. “Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes.” That is to say: music with gills. Not only that, but a massive stride for an artist whose career was kickstarted by sarcastic self-loathing. Or, for the sake of analogy, as if Michael Cera starred in the film version of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and actually did a kickass job. Of course he still fails to get the girl. And just because he’s suddenly acting serious doesn’t mean he’s not just as loveable as before.