Ghost ship
By Johnny Ray Huston

THE NAME OF the boat Beck captains on Sea Change just might be the Edmund Fitzgerald. He played, somewhat irritatingly, at being Prince throughout Midnite Vultures, but this time his vocal disguise is a forlorn tone that calls to mind Gordon Lightfoot, of all people. "The Golden Age" and "Lonesome Tears" are like those megadepressing story songs of '70s radio, too-tastefully reappointed. A calliope melody mocks him during the latter's bridge; he'll "ride farther than [he] should," though at least he won't run calling "Wildfire." Grandiose strings rise to a state of panic, then reach the kind of vacuum-packed lonely silence that only money can buy.

So go the big-budget blues. The great ship, they call it Dreamworks, and Beck's far from K and being OK. Creating a concept album for his ex-girlfriend, he trades in his warehouse of mixed metaphors for a travel bag of "classic" clichés and one hand-me-down Denis Johnson title ("Already Dead"). Small-scale lyrical details are dwarfed by the expensively expansive tragic atmosphere ("It's All in Your Mind"), and overall the dark mood is more monochromatic than dramatic. Still, Stephin Merritt might be jealous of the way "Lost Cause" finds shades of heartbreak in the tiny-light sounds of a glockenspiel – though he probably wouldn't admit it. On that song, glistening, glimmering backward-masked ghosts swirl and vanish around Beck as he ventures through an overfamiliar, gossip-mined city.

What's that on the pavement in front of him? Oh, just the heart ripped from his chest. He keeps accidentally kicking it as he shuffles down dirty streets, but don't you worry, and don't you dare have pity for him – no matter how easily stung, he says he's doing fine. The melodies say something else, though: they fall instead of rise. At least until the final stretch of the album, when some further deformed cousins of Mutations arrive to bring some rhythm, and Ravi Shankar fights Lightfoot for control of the ghost ship ("Sunday Sun"), leaving Beck to make love to the cigarette burr in his own voice ("Little One"). Onanism is the true forte of all solo artists, but it helps when they don't always play it straight.

Just ask Marianne Faithfull. Beck wrote and produced three tracks on her latest album, Kissin Time, and though created by different designers, the watercolor blobs on the sleeves of their newest CDs might as well be fragments of the same impossible-to-see larger picture. But the territories that Beck solemnly navigates before reaching a dead end, Faithfull treats like bits of scenery from a lifetime of occasionally glorious compulsion. He gives her "Sex with Strangers," and she responds with a wry "Yes, I've lived this before darling" interpretation that dodges in and out of electronic blips and bleeps like a sleepwalker on a dream date (fantasizing about leaving Mick for Keith and leaving Keith for Bob, probably). His "Like Being Born" is a pale descendant of "As Tears Go By," but in covering "Nobody's Fault But My Own," she finds a perfect way to Weill away the hours. Her voice is the rusty blade referred to in the very first line – 20 years from now, maybe Beck will have his own.