Beck Hits a Sad, Beautiful New High on ‘Ride Lonesome’

Beck’s first album in seven years is a sublime return to the somber folk-rock of career highpoints like 2002’s Sea Change and 2014’s Morning Phase. “You’ve got to cry a river,” he offers against the stately drift of the album opening title track, “Ride Lonesome.” Here the river of tears leads to an ocean of mellow gold. With its fragile acoustic melodies, desolate lyrics, and spare, subtle studio accompaniment, Ride Lonesome is like Nick Drake’s mumble-folk masterpiece Bryter Layter as the work of a lovelorn Laurel Canyon soft-rock poet. It’s been quite a while since Beck was associated with jokey post-modern irony but he’s rarely sounded this committed to deploying gorgeous melodies as a balm against his existential hangdog blues.

On “Run Away” he sings, “there’s nothing left to say/On desolation day,” brightening the grim wanderlust of his lyrics with a sweetly ascending California folk-rock track. “In the Night” is peak Drake-core, a brittle acoustic melody, a moonshadow of strings, and lyrics about darkness burying lies and how teachers and saints will walk you to the grave. “Failed Words” plays like a distant memory of an old Seventies AM radio piano ballad. On “Bleed” he’s as dejected as sad-Seventies Neil Young, singing “the sacraments, all you sacred cows/I can live without you now,” as his multi-tracked voice echoes through the song like a kind of chorus of distraught angels.

Ride Lonesome is amorphous, hazy, dappled, and almost impossibly pretty. Listening can feel like you’re floating in amniotic fluid. But the album never gets vague or sleepy. Every song stands out on its own. “Falling Through My Hands” is one of the finest lost-cause ballads he’s written, a fading-love song with a melody that sounds a touch like Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” poignant woodwind accompaniment, healing Beach Boys harmonies, and a grace note harmonica solo. “If You Don’t Know What Love Is” transmogrifies Gram Parsons’ “Wild Horses” into a paean to keeping your heart glowing amidst terror and darkness. He closes the album with the heart-splitting post-breakup benediction, “Beyond the Light,” riding as lonesome as a poor boy can ride and as on top of his game as ever.