To his credit, it wouldn’t usually occur to many artists with 30-year-long careers to come near a drum pad, and the kindest reading of Hyperspace would respect his willingness to adapt - which would be much easier if his attempts didn’t amount to such a middling LP. But ties from the past haven’t been severed completely harmonicas, acoustic guitars and some slide action lead ‘Saw Lightning’, coming off like an updated version of ‘Hotwax’. ‘Uneventful Days’ and ‘Love is a Chemical’ boasts pseudo-trap beats, spaced synth and even a quick-fire vocal delivery recalling someone like Migos. His fourteenth album Hyperspace, like Dreams before it, appeals to distinctly modern popular music forms - no doubt propelled by likeminded pop chameleon Pharrell Williams handling production duties. Fatally, as Beck became older, so too did his schtick. It’s quite the contrary it’s due to the genre-agnosticism he’s always been known for - a sensibility that melded country, electronic, hip-hop, soul, rock, and ‘exotica’ into some of the best party music of the 1990s - that today he seems less like the goofy, stylish troubadour of yore and more like Steve Buscemi‘s PI character in that one gag from 30 Rock. Almost two decades later, some say that Mr Hansen has been in that mode ever since.Īlthough he made a slight return to his rustic roots with 2014’s multi-Grammy award-winning Morning Phase, the nature of old man Hansen’s old-hat impulses come not in his adherence to one single genre.
Back in 2002, a memorable - although admittedly perhaps misremembered - review of Beck’s artistic gear-shift to the melancholic folk rock of Sea Change credited the LP to “Beck in grandpa-mode”.