Beck of Beyond

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Beck can be a real idiot. He says so himself. As evidence, the man who broke big nearly 10 years ago with the slacker anthem Loser and who was by his 1996 album Odelay being regularly declared a genius - the "Generation X Dylan" some said - offers his previous album Midnite Vultures.

It was a flaky, funky, scatterbrained thing which nodded heavily towards 70s sleaziness and the 80s heyday of Prince.

Pure idiocy but with good reason, he says down the line from Los Angeles during a frustratingly short interview.

"I think as a performer it's important to have an aspect of the provocateur and the profane and I'm not going to edit myself. I need to put out the silly, the ridiculous things. To me Marlon Brando is a real artist. He can do something that is just perfection which for all time will be considered one of the great performances. But he will also go and do The Island of Dr Moreau with an ice bucket hat, white face paint while wearing a bedsheet. I love that kind of willing to be an idiot in a way.

"There is a great Iggy Pop album called The Idiot. The idea of the beautiful idiot - we all have that and we try to edit that part out and pretend we don't. But we're lying."

But Beck Hansen (32) sounds anything but an idiot on Sea Change, which is - counting his occasional low-key independent releases - his eighth album.

It's a considered, downbeat, intimate collection of songs.

One where Beck's rap-fuelled, cryptic wordplay has been replaced by direct, confessional singer-songwriter-isms and elegant tunes. And care of producer Nigel Godrich - the man who helped Radiohead think big in the studio and who also helmed Beck's 1998 psychedelic wonder Mutations - Sea Change still sounds musically deep and lustrous.

If Midnite Vultures was the work of the happy idiot, Sea Change is the melancholic thinker and heart-bruised romantic.

Its emotive content has been enough for Rolling Stone to have already awarded it a rare five-star review saying, with due Dylan reference, "this is his Blood on the Tracks".

But why the swing from ironic, flip and funky good-time guy to Beck the brooding and intense?

"I go into one direction and really do it all the way and then, well ... " he chuckles. "But I think more than that it's sort of an unquantifiable muse. A creative impulse that can't really be quantified and explained. It just kind of goes where there are good songs."

No, he says the songs aren't particularly reflective of his life leading up to the album. A period which saw him split with his long-time girlfriend and then become briefly involved with Winona Ryder, actress, habitual groupie and alleged upmarket shoplifter.

"No, definitely not," says Beck.

But could he understand if some interpreted songs like Guess I'm Doing Fine and Lonesome Tears as being about his relationship ups and downs?

"Yeah they might but I didn't really have any interest at that time in recording songs."

And if Beck sounds older and wearier on Sea Change, it's also a reminder that the one-time punk-folkie who embraced blues, soul, funk and hip-hop along the way has quite a singing voice. A deep, rich croon.

"With these songs it's the way they were written. They were a little more down-tempo and I also wrote the songs so I could really dig in with the singing a bit more.

"I was just using my voice more and feeling more confident to really sing it and I've always downplayed my singing. I was kind of an anti-singer. There's a fine line between pathos and bathos and I usually didn't feel like bathing in the overkill."

As the debate begins about whether this is Beck's best, saddest or both, he's heading off on an American tour backed by the Flaming Lips, the veteran art-rock group whose new Yoshimi versus the Pink Robots is likely to end up alongside Sea Change in many a best-of-2002 list.

"They are just a great band. I've been a long-time fan, they have a real artistic bent. But they also write great songs.

"They have a semblance of sincerity and provocation and theatre and they wanted to do it."

It's likely the shows may be more sedate affairs than the brilliant soul revue extravaganza he brought to New Zealand in the wake of Odelay and which fed back into the sound of Midnite Vultures ("Maybe it should have been called Music from the show Midnite Vultures.")

Beck says he can't worry that those fans who liked him as the hip-hip goof of Loser and Odelay's Where It's At ("I got two turntables and a microphone ... ") might wonder why the party's over.

"I think I've lost the people who liked two turntables and a microphone. That existed in a world where there was no Eminem and no Kid Rock and none of these guys, so it was completely filling that gap. Those guys usurped that, so I am not even going to attempt to do that.

"I think the people who loved both are still there. That's one of the things I love about my audience - they're intelligent, they're diverse and they are the kind of people who grew up listening to Dylan and Devo.

"It's not codified and regimented as audiences might have been in the past. Call it modern, call it postmodern, whatever you will. It's just the sensibility of the time.

"I can do a very sincere acoustic version of a Gary Numan song and they are with it. They can appreciate it in a sense that it's tongue in cheek, but they can also appreciate that it's just a gorgeous song."

* Sea Change is released this week.