If 2014’s Morning Phase was surprising (and winning in every way) for its soft, supple melancholy—a distant cousin to Beck’s own Sea Change of a decade previous—his follow-up in Colors is doubly daring. Not in a risqué way that’s reminiscent of the thrill of hearing prime-Beck back-to-back oddities Odelay, Mutations and Midnite Vultures as one young, funky bunch but rather because this is the (mostly) matured, eccentric Beck in an upbeat, soulful (and not necessarily funked-up) mode, with Adele producer Greg Kurstin beside him.
Save for the grooving, frizzy “Dreams” (co-penned with Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt, and it sounds like it), the ambient alterna-pop/R&B of Colors is sleek, clean and clear. With spare electro-anthem “Wow” as the LP’s sonic lone nut, the swaggering, White Album-ish “Dear Life” finds Beck, the lyricist, in an existential mood, with “No Distraction” racing from behind to essay life’s dead-end dilemmas. The wiry “Seventh Heaven” sounds like Beck starting his gig in the new-wave ’80s rather than the loser ’90s. With his nicest falsetto in tow, he takes to the bottle-clinking percussive and slickly sequenced soul of “Up All Nite” as if he’s competing with DNCE for smooth dance-floor attention. That may be the album’s sole, sour grape: It’s more “now” than “wow.”
—A.D. Amorosi
