Beck’s latest release is a welcome addition to the 2014 indie rock library – Beck, who has been on hiatus for nearly 6 years, dabbling in other musical projects with colleagues including a covers album, has found serenity in the interim. Or so is the theme of Morning Phase, an enticing mixology of grand, resonant strings and luxurious guitar lines, a set of songs cohesively wrapped in sunshine (Beck himself confesses no song, perhaps unintentionally, reaches more than 60 beats per minute). The album begins with “Cycle”, a lush orchestral, ushering in a bare guitar strum and Beck's dripping wet vocal. The whole track has a lazy, Sunday feeling and that signature landscape of instrumentals with electronic accents and phaser/delay effects that icon-ifies his sound, especially in Sea Change. The album maintains this streak of dreamlike stupor throughout, including one of Beck’s shining tracks (also his first release from the record), the aloha-waving “Blue Moon”, a sultry mix of acoustics (ukelele, guitar) and a driving drum that gives the song a harder edge. The pulse, much like waves breaking shore, move the song along in tandem. The star track, “Waking Light”, is a beautiful piano ballade, and a welcome sonic shift from the guitar-centered mainstay, and one of my favorites on the album. It acts as a microcosm of the interplay between the orchestral and rock textures Beck plays with throughout.
As a unit, Morning Phase is an interesting addition to Beck’s discography, which is markedly robust and versatile. Morning Phase has a tranquility and thematic consistency that perhaps conveys a narrower scope than his earlier work, but acts like a tone poem, giving the group of songs a sense of belonging to each other like movements to a symphony. It seems that Beck’s time away from the studio has granted him deep introspection, and the resulting effect entices the very same sort of inner journey in the listener.
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