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Reviews: Beck's 'Colors,' St. Vincent's 'Masseduction' thrive in vibrant, alternative pop worlds

 
Recording artist Beck accepts the Best Rock Album award for "Morning Phase" onstage during the 2015 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Recording artist Beck accepts the Best Rock Album award for "Morning Phase" onstage during the 2015 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Published Oct. 13, 2017

Flash back, if you will, to Aug. 25, 2015, and one of the more unusual stops on Taylor Swift's 1989 Tour. That night in Los Angeles, Swift brought out guests St. Vincent and Beck to perform the latter's single Dreams.

Swift probably respects both artists a lot. Maybe she liked the song, too. But there's no doubt she also hoped to earn critical cred by having two of alternative music's coolest, most creative polymaths collaborate live on her stage.

Two years later, Beck and St. Vincent have dropped hotly anticipated albums that push their alternative ethos into a more mainstream direction. Here, look what Swift made them do.

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St. Vincent (real name: Annie Clark) has been inching toward the mainstream for years, even outside of her cameo in Swift's squad. There was her 2015 Grammy win for Best Alternative Album (St. Vincent), her role directing part of the horror anthology flick XX, her tabloid-ready relationships with Kristen Stewart and Cara Delevingne.

Co-produced by chart whisperer Jack Antonoff (Swift, Lorde), Masseduction is billed as St. Vincent's first pop album — a claim that, given the grooves she laid down on 2011's Strange Mercy and 2009's Actor, doesn't ring totally true. But Masseduction is an arms-wide embrace of a wider sonic palette — still a challenge, like everything she does, but perhaps her most rewarding to date.

Case in point: Lead single New York. St. Vincent is an extraordinary, boundary-pushing electric guitarist, yet New York is a piano ballad, swelling with strings and a racing-heart pulse, no guitars in sight, delivered to "the only motherf---er in the city who can stand me." It's not an outlier, either. Happy Birthday, Johnny is another piano ballad, an introspective torch song with a mournful slide guitar and a bed of melancholy strings. Slow Disco aches with a cinematic, closing-credits heart. And opener Hang On Me rides a drowsy, sinister synthesizer to arena-sized heights, a little like U2's Numb.

But across Masseduction are many yins to New York's yang, usually rooted in Gothic, industrial Europop and darkwave. You can hear echoes of Bowie, New Order, Sisters of Mercy, Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, even INXS on the title track. Savior is a scorched-vinyl swath of S&M funk, reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' Closer or Into the Void. Staticky guitars growl and grind on the throbbing Los Ageless and Fear the Future. And Young Lover, with its relentless guitars and a delirious vocal performance from St. Vincent, escalates once again to an exhilarating, U2-like climax.

Like the album's fluorescent cover and marketing campaign, some songs feel a touch overstimulated. Sugarboy races with strobing, video-game blips and spurts, St. Vincent's punkish guitars and distorted voice burning through the digital noise. The manic Pills begins as a pepped-up commentary on pharmacological dependency ("Pills to wake, pills to sleep / pills, pills, pills every day of the week") but wraps with a psychedelic comedown and realization: "Everyone you love will all go away."

That openness and, at times, painful self-awareness makes Masseduction captivating from top to bottom. It is at once enormous and focused, bracing and welcoming. It's an album that tries to be everything, and very often gets there. Does that make it pop? No. But once it's in your head, good luck getting it out.

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Beck never sits still for long. Each album veers from trash-can funk to slinky sound-collage bops to introspective mountain folk. But while he can be deadly with a hook — Loser, Devils Haircut, E-Pro — he's never made a pure pop album.

Until now. Colors sounds like nothing Beck's ever done, all awash in synthesizers and handclaps and bright pianos and snappy '80s guitar riffs. It definitely fits into the 2017 trend of indie-alternative acts (the Killers, Arcade Fire, Portugal. The Man) eyeballing the dancefloor; even if there's no direct Swift influence, you'll definitely hear echoes of Walk the Moon or Mark Ronson.

Yet in its gusto and glee in exploring the form, it all sounds undeniably like Beck.

The opening title track is a jittery mix of Beck's chopped, staccato vocals bouncing all over an electro-funk beat, then drifting into a cloudy chorus that sounds like Duran Duran covering the Beach Boys. Those stacked vocal harmonies rise up again on the adrenalized Seventh Heaven, floating above a pulse of slinky guitar licks and twinkling chimes. And you'd have to go back to The New Pollution to find a Beck song with as catchy a retro vibe as Square One.

The shambolic, postmodern Beck of old pops up throughout, rapping nonsense over a slicked-up, glam-grunge guitar riff on I'm So Free; or crooning over a junkyard piano and distorted guitar on the loping Dear Life. Up All Night feels like a classic Beck disco pastiche, a collage of shifty samples and crisp percussion sculpted into a three-minute chunk of dance-rock abandon.

Dreams, a song debuted two years ago, is here in a slightly updated mix — the guitars feel louder, more tactile — as is the elliptical, hip-hoppy Wow, last year's flute-tootin' stab at a song of the summer. But as familiar as those songs are, they still sound vibrant on Colors. All 10 tracks have a precise, genuine snap and crackle — a relief, perhaps, for anyone worn weary by 2014's Mourning Phase, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year, but remains a pretty moody listen. Even the most downbeat song on Colors, expansive album closer Fix Me, could fly on the right kind of radio.

Given his career-long habit of course correction, Beck's pop phase won't last forever. But with Colors, it's a pleasure to enjoy it while we can.

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.

Rank the contenders

1. St. Vincent, Masseduction: Its arms-wide-open sonic palette, from grinding, industrial Europop to sweeping, string-backed piano ballads, yields a challenging yet compelling album that might be her best to date.

2. Beck, Colors: Beck's first headfirst dive into pop is relentlessly upbeat and gleeful, yet the singer's off-kilter instincts are never too far from the surface.