news / updates
December 23, 2002
Another album coming up?
Blender says:
Beck has accounced that he has many songs left over from the sessions of his newest album, Sea Change. and may release another CD within the year.
They also have a
review of the October 31st concert in NY.
There are more new(ish)
pictures [concert - 11], with a bunch of them courtesy of
Indianapolis Music Net taken by
Kristen Leep. [Thanks Steve and
Matt!]
There are a bunch of new photos in
Bekkies from Roxanne!
December 22, 2002
Sea Change is number 42 on
Pitchfork's
Top 50 Albums of 2002:
Few albums released this year were as divisive as Sea Change, the album that saw a matured, more sophisticated Beck discovering his sensitive side. On one side you had those that championed the album's majestic Godrich orchestra, and Beck's ability to summarize so much emotional depth with seeming non-sequiturs; on the other were those who perceived the lack of eccentric mischievousness as critical acclimation. The Pitchfork staff found itself as evenly divided, trading shouts of "virtuoso!" and "diva!" across our desks. I'm somewhere in the middle myself, but this is how I figure it: Beck is the closest our generation has come to a David Bowie multi-personality, and if Midnite Vultures was his Young Americans, Sea Change is undoubtedly his Station to Station: a searching crooner's epic, punctuated by paranoid, lovelorn poetry, and production radiant enough to illuminate the most minute details. --Ryan Schreiber
December 20, 2002
What do you know,
Beck has a robot nephew!
Duuuh.
Hooray for
Diesel Sweeties!
[thanks
Carmen!]
December 11, 2002
Beck + lasers + iPod = ?
...
Beck logo laser-engraved iPod! What were you expecting?
Better get them now or else after January 8th people with special Beck iPods will point and laugh at you as you weep in a puddle of dark, gloomy agony. Or if you already have an iPod, you can try taking a laser to it and carving in some of that Beck goodness.
...at your own risk.
Remember
this? [woo woo
stewoo.net!]
December 10, 2002
On the second day of
KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas, Beck played for 40 minutes with the
Flaming Lips and at the end of the set they were joined by
Chris Martin, Jack Johnson, and actress Juliette Lewis to sing "Do They Know It's Christmas?" There's more info at
NME and
MTV.
MTV also has some
disproportioned photos and
Wireimage has a lot of
concert action in thumbnail form.
Check out
bekkies for some great photos from Genevieve!
Tune in to
KCRW on December 24 at 11:00 am PST for a special performance by
Beck on the show
Morning Becomes Eclectic hosted by Nic Harcourt. The session was recorded live in KCRW's studio in November. Nic has hailed Beck's "Sea Change" as the 'Best Album of 2002'.
December 6, 2002
Rolling Stone mentions Beck's recent appearance at the KCRW Sounds Ecleectic Evening:
Beck: Grease Is the Word
"Tonight I decided to make it my 'Divas Night,'" says Beck backstage at a recent benefit for Los Angeles public radio station KCRW. This being public radio, the divas in question were Beth Orton and Norah Jones, as well as Sia Furler from the British trip-hop group Zero 7. So Beck e-mailed the ladies on the bill, asking them to pick a duet. Orton opted for the Stones' "No Expectations," Jones went for "Sleepless Nights," made famous by Gram Parsons. But it was Furler who stole the show. "She chose 'You're the One That I Want,' from Grease," says Beck. "I've been working on my Travolta for years." Furler, who's an Australian as Olivia Newton-John, was acclaimed by her peers and took it with typical Aussie enthusiasm. "Maybe I'll have to go have a wank!"
They also listed
Sea Change as one of the 50 records of the year:
Some music is so beautiful it literally hurts to feel it piercing your body -- like The Best of the Stylistics or Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, or this album, a masterpiece of gorgeously orchestrated acoustic heartbreak. In weepy ballads such as "The Golden Age" and "Lonsome Tears," Beck still sounds like the same wiseass guitar trickster who once sang "Loser" -- only now he knows how it feels to actually lose something. - Rob Sheffield
Q also mentions
Sea Change as one of the best albums of 2002:
His loss was the world's gain as the end of a steady relationship propelled the usually mercurial Beck Hansen towards the one musical area he'd so far avoided: straightforward love songs. After his previous album, 1999's sprawling, funky Midnite Vultures, the results were forensically bald. Here were pained tales of love and loss rendered sumptuous by careful string arrangements and Nigel Godrich's rich but sympathetic production.
Congratulations to
Truck and
beck.com for winning "Best Designed Music Page" in the
2002 Online Music Awards! Click
here to listen to an interview with Truck.
Lastly, some more
pictures are up. [concert - 5]
December 5, 2002
Blender names
Sea Change the 5th greatest album of 2002:
Apparently, this downbeat but lovely record was inspired by the disintegration of Beck's long-term relationship with Leigh Limon. He's keeping mum about the details, but frankly, who cares? Sea Change's stark, unfaddish intensity is for anyone in the throes of heartbreak who needs a little catharsis, and "Lost Cause" and "Round the Bend" are so strong, they're uplifting. Almost.
December 3, 2002
"I Got You Beck"/"I Got You Wayne"! Yeah, sometimes Beck likes to
punch Wayne but they
played some lovely music (and there goes Beck
again and
again) at the recent
KCRW Sounds Eclectic Evening. And then...
party!
Beck is on this month's cover of
ARTnews Magazine (December 2002 issue).
He is featured in the article
Art Rocks:
"From making sculptures out of melted LPs, to creating album covers and music videos, to playing in their own bands, a new generation of artists is blurring the distinction between the worlds of pop music and fine art."
Click
here for the full editorial by Barbara Pollack.
[thanks ms. e, little e & the spc/nyc!]
December 1, 2002
In the January issue of
Spin,
Sea Change is #3 in their list of "Albums of the Year":
The prince of L.A. cool finds himself Googling ex-girlfriends at 3 A.M, moping around with an acoustic guitar, feeling totally unfunny and even less ironic. Stranded on the lost highway between Silverlake and Nashville, wondering if his golden age if history, Beck translates his pain into shocklingly lovely country rock. Sadness accrues. - Joe Gross
[Album #4 is
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots...mmm!]
The magazine also has a review of the
October 17th concert:
Beck Hansen never wanted to be a generation's spokesman. But his total output adds up to a compelling narrative of the last eighth years--from lose anthems to world-savvy genre experiments, and now, a deep and disillusioned blues, shot through with heartache and perfectly times for our national malaise. On the other hand, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne is the alt-rock elder statesman who refuses to lose his sense of wonder at life’s mysteries. The Lips opened this show with a quick set, during which Coyne smeared fake blood on his face, mugged for the lipstick camera mounted on his mic, and cheered the 15-odd people he’d recruited from the streets of downtown Minneapolis to dance in the wings and wave high beams at the crowd. Befitting his role as a benign Jim Jones, Coyne was the only one onstage not wearing a fuzzy animal suit.
Beck was initially as austere as the lips were chaotic. One moment he was talking through a mic that made him sound like Mr. Roboto, and the next he was delivering “One Food in the Grave” in a powerful Merie Haggard baritone. He told the crowd that they rocked harder than the harmonica he was goofing around with, then suddenly became a weary troubadour singing Hank Williams’ “Lonesome Whistle.” In the middle of “The Golden Age,” the majestic song that opens his new Sea Change album, soft lights revealed the Lips on a platform behind a dark scrim. Positioned stage right, Coyne looked like a grinning cartoon devil perched on Beck’s shoulder.
Too bad the devil wasn’t more persuasive. Why stock the stage with acid casualties like the Lips and have them merely reproduce the album’s contemplative mood? Beck gamely wandered into the audience to fandango with Coyne during “The New Pollution” and did the splits during “Where It’s At”; but he was clearly more comfortable with songs like the somber “It’s All In Your Mind,” on which the Lips stuck just the right note of sonic support. As the show closed with the delicate “Round the bend,” Coyne returned to his stage-right platform, but this time he was an angel, grabbing a lamp by its cord and swinging it over his head like a lasso. As the light arched across the dark theater, it made us all look like beautiful losers. – Greg Milner
