{"id":624733,"date":"2026-09-14T21:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T21:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624733\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T21:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T21:20:12","slug":"beck-ride-lonesome-review-stunning-end-to-the-heartache-trilogy-of-sea-change-and-morning-phase-beck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624733\/","title":{"rendered":"Beck: Ride Lonesome review \u2013 stunning end to the heartache trilogy of Sea Change and Morning Phase | Beck"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time Beck<\/a> released an album it was 2019 and the singer-songwriter found himself in a strange and unenviable position. In some quarters, the arrival of Hyperspace was eagerly anticipated precisely because his personal life was in turmoil. Nine months before its release, his 15-year marriage to actor Marissa Ribisi had ended in divorce, an experience he understandably described as heartbreaking. Unfortunately for him, there exists a pervasive argument that Beck\u2019s greatest work is born out of misery.<\/p>\n

The artwork for Ride Lonesome. Photograph: Capitol<\/p>\n

His beloved 2002 album Sea Change featured a set of disconsolate acoustic songs written in the wake of a break-up with his long-term girlfriend Leigh Limon that Beck had initially thought were too personal for public consumption. They were certainly very different from the knowing, postmodern approach with which he\u2019d made his name, but no matter: Sea Change went on to become a huge critical and commercial success. It wasn\u2019t entirely clear what prompted the gloomy mood of 2014\u2019s Morning Phase, but it very much seemed to be cut from similar musical and lyrical cloth. Some critics suggested it was the best album of his career; it subsequently won three Grammys, including album of the year. Given the circumstances, there was much pre-release speculation that Hyperspace would be a companion piece.<\/p>\n

Instead, Hyperspace was synth-heavy, produced by Pharrell Williams and clearly influenced by vaporwave: its tone was dreamily buoyant and noticeably light on wracked soul-bearing. After its release, Beck seemed to tacitly suggest to fans of Sea Change and Morning Phase that there wouldn\u2019t be any more where they came from. \u201cWhen I try to shoe-horn my life into a song,\u201d he told the New Yorker, \u201cit gets really ham-fisted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven years on, he appears to have reconsidered. The first thing you hear on Ride Lonesome is a softly strummed acoustic guitar, echoey pedal steel and Beck\u2019s voice. \u201cWalk away, hang your head on the hollow moon,\u201d he sings, as the album\u2019s title track gets under way: should there be any lingering doubt about the mood it\u2019s intent on evoking, it goes on to reference Julie London\u2019s Cry Me a River and Johnny Thunders\u2019 You Can\u2019t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. \u201cIt feels like I\u2019ve been here before,\u201d he sings on Bleed, as strings gently rise and fall around him.<\/p>\n

He certainly has. There\u2019s an intentionality about the way Ride Lonesome reconvenes the team responsible for Sea Change and Morning Phase \u2013 the former\u2019s producer Nigel Godrich is once more behind the mixing desk, the backing musicians who appear on both albums are present and correct, the orchestrations are the work of Beck\u2019s father David Campbell \u2013 and about the artists the music here evokes. As on Sea Change\u2019s Round the Bend and Morning Phase\u2019s Heart Is a Drum, the ghosts of Nick Drake and his string arranger Robert Kirby are very clearly summoned up, most noticeably on In the Night. On Run Away, we find Beck exactly where he was on Sea Change\u2019s The Golden Age and Morning Phase\u2019s Unforgiven: alone, behind the wheel of a car in the small hours, aimlessly driving around in an attempt to assuage his unhappiness.<\/p>\n

Similar sound, similar mood, similar lyrical themes: of course, the danger is of diminishing returns. But Ride Lonesome never feels like a pale imitation or a craven attempt to recapture past glories. That\u2019s partly because of the standard of the songwriting. Beck has suggested that one reason the album took so long to make is because of stringent quality control: songs were recorded, then set aside for years, then reconsidered, a huge amount of material was discarded. You can tell: everything here, from the sparse country-rock of Slow Canyon to the lush, harmony-drenched Falling Through My Hands is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also because Ride Lonesome is clearly an album made by a noticeably older artist than either of its predecessors: its mood is marked not just by the collapse of a relationship, but a sense of time passing, of things \u2013 to borrow a phrase from Nick Drake \u2013 moving just a little too fast. \u201cI don\u2019t know where I\u2019m going,\u201d he sings on Bleed, as strings gently rise and fall around him, \u201cbut it feels like I\u2019ve been here before\u201d: a neat capturing of a very mid-50s kind of malaise. An affecting sense of weariness seeps into everything, even the ostensibly optimistic \u2013 and utterly lovely \u2013 closer Beyond the Light comes filled with evocations of lost \u201cnameless days\u201d and of \u201cthe dying of the light\u201d.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Beck, Ride Lonesome does little to dispel the aforementioned theory about his best work being born out of unhappiness. There\u2019ll be consolation in the fact it\u2019s also that rarest of things: a sequel to a sequel that\u2019s every bit as good as its predecessors.<\/p>\n

Ride Lonesome is released on 18 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time Beck released an album it was 2019 and the singer-songwriter found himself in a strange…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-624733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}