That Beck returns with such a strong work is maybe the easiest way to be surprised. Beck's credit in the pop cultural stakes seemed to have disappeared when the decade, of which he seemed such a telling symptom and clever chronicler, faded away into something new and uncertain. The over-praised Odelay did signal this slow decline into uselessness. The emperor's new clothes, a betrayal of a promise. To his credit, it was something he seemed aware of, if the album cover was to be believed: Beck as the cute, somewhat eccentric dog doing his boring trick. Nowadays, Beck still seems aloof, incapable of transmitting something like believable feelings of love (or lust — at one level he still remains a prepubescent boy), yet his music isn't without a core of feeling: melancholia — Sea Change breathes it, flowing from a source of disappointment with people, cities, and culture. Quite the opposite of Mellow Gold, which captured the happy-go-lucky zing of the early nineties, Sea Change feels narrow.

Of course the title explains a lot: Sea Change, a radical turn, perhaps as a hint of artistic maturation, a turning away from the tired silliness and unconvincing Prince simulacra of Midnite Vultures. Even so, Beck remains too much of the eternal boy to pull that trick off. To get to the center of the album, one must see its title as a new chapter in a geographical myth based around the relationship between Los Angeles and the Pacific. L.A. as the End of the West, the eternal dying moments of expansion, the folding of modern man at the final beach, when there is nowhere left to go. At one level, Sea Change is permeated with a feeling of sadness as a product of seeing every frontier collapse. Let the golden age begin . . . I don t think so.