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Last September, I paid good money to see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, open for The National. That tour was much blogged about, as the headliners consistently played to half full rooms after people left following the super-hyped CYHSY. Many that stuck around commented that the people who bolted missed the better band. I’m not proud to say, I am one of those people that left early. At that time, The National had completely slipped under my radar. Perhaps I was confusing them with Grand National (who I heard and didn’t like), but I went outside between sets to join some friends while they had a cigarette, one thing led to the other, and we never did make it back inside. After their 3rd LP ‘Alligator’ made numerous end of year lists it’s been on constant rotation on my iPod. Not really in the middle of a tour anymore, the Brooklyn based band was to play a one off show at the Bowery Ballroom last night, and I jumped at the chance to finally see them. The show sold out almost immediately, and with no room in the schedule to add a night it was disapointingly moved to the larger, and greatly inferior, Webster Hall.
Channeling (and appropriating) Neil Young and Serge Gainsbourg, Sea Change is Beck’s response to a painful breakup with his former girlfriend. The album starts off on a whistful, somber note as Beck sings, “Put your hands on the wheel, let the golden age begin,” as a way of setting a tone of moving on. The album is cohesive, in that every track is a painful recollection of lost love, adding to the frustration and emotional vent, rather than exploring the topic from different moods or vantagepoints. Nigel Godrich’s production is superb, supporting Beck rather than masking his vocals in instrumentation as in Jon Brion’s overproduced track for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.