1/14/2024 0 Comments Hyperspace album![]() Whatever fears you have in these uncertain times, this is an album that offers both an escape from – and a way of understanding – them.Beck's 14th album, Hyperspace, is out Nov. ![]() Hyperspace may have been born of personal despair, but Beck has channeled that into something universal. Whether taking postmodernity to its furthest extremes ( Odelay, Midnite Vultures), or making sense of an increasingly fractured cultural landscape ( The Information), Beck consistently captures the zeitgeist. Without releasing albums of his own, he filled his time producing great works for others – Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore, and Stephen Malkmus among them – but what the world really needed was Beck to return to his own visions. Though the arrangements are more stripped back than those on Colors, the mix is sumptuous, spacious, comforting, and compelling – Hyperspace all but invites you to sink into it and let your mind wander through the aural world it creates.ĭuring that six-year silence, Beck’s absence was too keenly felt. While the album’s lyrics are full of doubt and uncertainty, they’re anchored by music that is assured – at times buoyant – and compelling. If this sounds like a downer, don’t worry. But as the music drops out, his bare voice offers just one phrase: “I feel so ugly when you see through me.” It’s a desolate, haunting moment, as if exposing the real human underneath the virtual shield is too painful to bear. “Coming out of my life, you know I’m trying to reach you,” Beck sings atop bubbling synths, as if life is newly coming into focus around him. If Hyperspace’s title track deals with the unremitting barrage of stuff that is life in the 21st Century (“Losing form, it’s all resonating/No we can’t articulate it/Infrastructure all outdated/This could be a simulation”), a song the likes of “See Through” explores how difficult it can be to make empathetic connections in a world where most communication is done from behind a screen. While that track’s merging of electronica and gospel ends the album on notes of both release and revelation, with a choir on hand to take Hyperspace’s closing moments into celestial realms, the album’s overall vibe is closer to the lovelorn mode of Sea Change, tinged with the existential paranoia of Beck’s 2006 opus, The Information.Ĭlick to load video Capturing the zeitgeist A consummately crafted workīeck has described Hyperspace’s recording process as: “Everything’s on and inspiration strikes and then everything happens completely fast, and there’s not a lot of second-guessing.” But Hyperspace is a consummately crafted work, with three distinct movements: crisis (“Uneventful Days”: “Living in the dark, waiting for the light/Caught up in these never-ending battle lines/Everything is changed, nothing here feels right”), followed by dark nights of the soul (“Dark Places”: “It’s two in the morning/I’m lost in the moment… Been so lonely/So unholy”) and the emotional release of the final act (“Everlasting Nothing”: “I washed up on the shoreline/everyone was waiting there for me… In your time, you’ll find something”). In short, it’s as if Morning Phase and Colors found a middle ground: flawless songcraft meets electronic pop, both leading each other away from their comfort zones. On Hyperspace, however, Pharrell and Beck work in perfect synthesis. The danger of having two such unique artists work together is that they end up canceling each other out, as opposed to taking each other into unchartered territory. ![]() Listen to Hyperspace on Apple Music and Spotify. Hyperspace is, in Beck’s telling, an album about “finding peace in the moment” – and, with its sparse electro arrangements and lyrics in search of relief from troubled times, it is an album resolutely of the moment. Does Pharrell have a “Happy” to distract us? Is Beck mixing business with leather on escapist party jams? No. ![]() The mind boggles at the thought of what the pair might have made together at the turn of the millennium: Pharrell, his fingerprints over almost every hit song of the era Beck, deconstructing the very notion of how songs were meant to be written… Put that together and who knows where 21st-century pop may have gone? Now, however, with both of these guys approaching 50, and another new decade dawning, their music – and music in general – is in a very different place.īut is the rest of the world? Call it Y2K fever, pre-millennium tension, or, party over, oops, out of time, but a similar dread that pervaded the coming of the year 2000 permeates the current cultural climate. Twenty years after first wanting to work with Pharrell Williams, Beck finally gets his wish.
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