Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 34: Beck, “Wave”

“I move away from this place / In the form of a disturbance / And enter into the world / Like some tiny distortion …”

The first I heard of Beck’s Morning Phase was through Sasha Frere-Jones’s review in The New Yorker in February, which kicked into superlative gear with this striking insight: “After listening to `Morning Phase’ almost fifty times, I can’t find a single thing wrong with it.” Striking that a professional reviewer (counter to stereotype) would listen to the record fifty times before writing about it; striking that, having done so, he would pronounce it “perfect” in such faint terms of praise. The insight evoked the expression accompanying the imprimatur in certain Catholic books: Nihil obstat, or “nothing stands in the way.”

Now I have listened to Morning Phase almost fifty times, and I can’t find a single thing wrong with it. Turns out this is an accurate way to express the album’s effect. It’s a beautiful record, a gorgeous record, a heartbreaking (or heartbreaking-sounding) record – and yet it goes down so naturally and effortlessly that it is no putdown to call it “easy listening.”

Ben Ratliff in the Times heard the record as the sum of sounds and influences — such as the Arvo Part-like strings on “Wave” — and asked: “How could a record so good have nothing at the center? Or, to turn the question around: How can something with so many borrowed parts achieve a distinct unity and even, if you like, a soul?”

Where Sasha understates his way to the truth, Ben gets the record by overstating the point about it. Because Beck is a clever, writerly guy about our age who has a large record collection, we expect his records to have an intellectual or conceptual center. In Morning Phase the center is distinctly emotional or spiritual – even, if you like, soulful.