The lyrics in these songs complement Beck and Pharrell's respective musical instincts, which nudge familiar genre tropes slightly off their predictable patterns and expected tonalities. The feeling of resignation carries over to "Star," a strangely hesitant R&B number in which he's cautious and deferential as he moves out of their home, and the computerized folk track " Dark Places," where he's reacquainting himself with loneliness while trying to negotiate his way out of it. In sound alone, many of the songs aren't far off from the glossy bops of Beck's previous album, Colors, which yielded the late-career crossover hits " Up All Night" and " Dreams." But the often aggressive cheeriness of that album is gone, replaced by a dazed numbness most easily parsed as "Wow, this guy is going through something." It is very much a breakup album, navigating themes as devastating as anything on Sea Change - but it is also a clear collaboration with its co-producer, Pharrell Williams, heavy on low-key funk and bright synthesizer tones. Hyperspace, his latest, disrupts the pattern, falling into a nebulous space between the two extremes. But in the course of 13 albums and a quarter-century, even casual listeners have come to recognize the two main modes in which he works. Stylistically, Beck remains a musical chameleon of remarkable range and elasticity. When news broke earlier this year that Beck's marriage of nearly 15 years was ending, it seemed a safe bet that a certain kind of album would follow: not the surreal, up-tempo Beck of Odelay, Midnite Vultures or Guero, but something melancholy and ballad-heavy - like his album of the year winner, Morning Phase, or his 2002 breakup opus, Sea Change. Beck's 14th album, Hyperspace, is out Nov.
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