It’s certainly a unique listen, even by Beck’s eclectic standards, but it’s debatable how often you’ll actually want to journey back to Hyperspace.
Name any musical genre, and there’s a good chance Beck has done it. He’s best known for both the alternative rock dominating Odelay, Guero, and Modern Guilt, and the stripped-down folk of Mutations, Sea Change, and Morning Phase, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Midnite Vultures was his unique spin on soul and funk. His hit singles “Loser” and “Where It’s At,” were rooted in awkward white boy hip-hop, as was much of The Information. His most recent album Colors was an unexpected jaunt into pop and dance music. Digging deeper, he’s also done Latin music (see “Tropicalia” from Mutations), metal (see the early 90s b-side “Spanking Room”), and a ton of weird experimental stuff (see Stereopathetic Soulmanure). He’s known for blending multiple styles within albums and even within tracks, making him a virtual chameleon of musical genres, and you never know what he’ll do next.
It might seem impossible, but Hyperspace sounds nothing like anything Beck has done before. It’s his most electronic-oriented album to date, yet its mild tone places it closer to the acoustic Sea Change and Morning Phase. There’s a healthy dose of hip-hop and R&B influences throughout, but it couldn’t be more dissimilar from his past takes on rap and soul. It’s minimalist, 80s influenced, touches on the bizarre subgenre of “vaporwave,” and is indisputably inventive. More debatable is how often you’ll actually want to journey back to Hyperspace.
The greatest first impression of Hyperspace is how dispirited Beck sounds relative to Colors two years ago. Beck and his wife divorced earlier this year, which provides some context for dejected lyrics like “Uneventful days, uneventful nights, living in that dark, waiting for the light.” To hammer in this sentiment, there’s even a song called “Dark Places” with the line “some days I go dark places in my soul.” The album does have some relatively sunny bits like “Die Waiting,” where Sky Ferreira contributes backing vocals, yet it still has sobering lines like “I can’t understand why I’ve waited for so long just to walk out of the door, see the world moving on.” The last time we saw a complete musical about-face like this was when the party album Midnite Vultures was followed by the somber Sea Change, which likewise marked a relationship’s end. Beck himself disagreed that Hyperspace is a “divorce album,” instead stating that each song was “a portrait of a person in a mood of life,” but there is still an underlying listlessness behind much of the release.
While there’s no reason to doubt that Beck alone could have been responsible for the unorthodox sounds of Hyperspace, he enlisted Pharrell Williams to co-produce the majority of the album. Pharrell might be best known for hits like “Happy” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” but Beck praised his work, calling him “a master minimalist.” This explains the stark nature of so many tracks on Hyperspace, like the aforementioned “Dark Places,” where acoustic strumming is joined by chillwave-ish synths. Meanwhile, the R&B of “See Through,” one of the few tracks Pharrell did not co-produce, might be the sparsest thing Beck’s made, with only ambient synthesizer notes and a simple drum loop for accompaniment. The embrace of electronic elements that have slowly gained prevalence in modern pop is a surprising enough inclusion, but he ups the ante by mixing them with the same folky earnestness we heard in Morning Phase. “Chemical” is the pinnacle of this peculiar juxtaposition, where Beck’s lofty vocals and an acoustic guitar meet trap beats and new wave keyboards. Beck was already hard enough to categorize as an artist, and now it’s difficult to describe most individual tracks on Hyperspace without namedropping at least three different genres.
Despite the uniqueness of these tracks, some of the most compelling parts of Hyperspace are those that will sound more familiar to long-time Beck fans. “Saw Lightning” is an upbeat number underpinned by a snare drum and a sample of a twangy country guitar, and Pharrell lends his vocal talents to rap a few bars between Beck’s verses. Blends of hip-hop and country were all the rage this year after Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” but Beck is a proven maestro at this combo, with songs from “Loser” to “Hotwax” to “Hell Yes” all under his belt. It’s nice to see him back at it. Speaking of hip-hop, the title track sets hazy synthesizers to a reprise of the album’s opener “Hyperlife” before Beck’s auto-tuned vocals suddenly become a rap where he’s joined by guest Terrell Hines. It’s over too soon, but left turns like these keep Hyperspace from becoming an 80s-nostalgic neon blur.
It’s easy to appreciate the ingenuity of Hyperspace’s instrumentation and its patchwork of styles that summarize what’s trendy with today’s pop. It’s harder for Hyperspace to mentally stick, especially compared to what Beck has given us in the past 25 years. In the New Yorker’s recent deep dive into his past, he noted how his more serious albums were more readily praised than his light-hearted ones, or “it’s like how people talk about comedy being harder to pull off than drama.” To his credit, Morning Phase won Album of the Year at the 2015 Grammys, and it feels contrarian to knock Sea Change. Meanwhile, if your first exposure to Beck was “Loser” or “Sexx Laws,” you might think he’s a novelty act. Hyperspace is definitely “serious Beck,” but this persona lacks the same pull the third or fourth time around. There are barely any hooks here, which admittedly isn’t much of a surprise, but by the time “Stratosphere” rolls around you may think “where is this album going? I’m on the 8th track already?” Electronic R&B mixed with heart-on-sleeve folk is distinctive and all, but multiple tracks of it in a row will yield diminishing returns.
It’s just like Beck to constantly reinvent his music and experiment, and Hyperspace is best thought of as such – an experiment. It’s a neat listen, but it’s hard to imagine revisiting most of its tracks over and over, especially when up against the stiff competition of his 13 other studio albums. After you lift off to Hyperspace, you can take some comfort in the fact that Beck never does the same thing twice.
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