![]() The hip-hop auteur plays the totally Eighties synth sounds that frame the fleeting satisfaction in “Chemical” (“Found a love, just a fantasy/Beautiful and ugly as a night could be”), and it’s a good bet that Williams is responsible for the otherworldly gauze on Beck’s voice in “Uneventful Days,” which is like David Bowie’s Major Tom checking in from distant orbit.īeck spreads the work around. Williams is just as embedded on Hyperspace as co-producer, co-writer, and musician on seven tracks. He shared writing credits on Odelay with the Dust Brothers, his co-producers, and on 2017’s Colors with multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin. While Beck started as a lone ranger on the anti-folk circuit, his records are typically collaborative affairs. In songs like “Die Waiting” and “Dark Places” (the titles tell you plenty), Beck combines the exuberant studio mischief of 1996’s Midnite Vultures with the sumptuous introspection of 2002’s Sea Change to eccentric, genuinely compelling effect. But that seesaw of antique blues and modern artifice sums up this album’s perfect storm - the raw fear of time running out and darkness closing in, rendered in pop beats and colors. Pharrell Williams, Beck’s chief accomplice on Hyperspace, drums in martial-funk time and speed raps like a digital assistant in a rush. Beck sings of great fire and flooding, praying for rescue in a strident android’s tone - like Skip James in Auto-Tune - and overdubbed layers of galactic doo-wop. ![]() ![]() Most of the song’s apocalypse comes in contemporary kicks. That is the Beck who jumps out here in “Saw Lightning,” in looping spasms of acoustic, skidding Delta slide guitar. Somewhere inside every album Beck has made since Mellow Gold - his 1994 surprise attack of slippery irony and hip-hop bravado - is the solo folk-blues singer caught on that year’s One Foot in the Grave, writing about despair with a surrealist edge while turned toward hope.
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