Album Review: "Ride Lonesome" by Beck
Is it really plagiarism if you're stealing from yourself?
After the longest time in between studio albums in his career, Beck released “Ride Lonesome.” While it does have interesting ideas, these ideas are re-hashed from previous moody folk releases by Beck in completely milquetoast ways.
To some, Beck has been a cultural institution for over 30 years. Ever since he earned a top 10 hit with his song “Loser” in 1994, Beck has been experimenting with his style musically. In his experimentation, though, he has had two distinct personalities: one is the upbeat, rocking, sampling Beck and the other is a moody, folksy Beck.
Beck’s first album in seven years, “Ride Lonesome,” lands perfectly square in his moody, folksy camp of albums. I won’t say it was completely unexpected, though; ever since “Hyperspace” came out in 2019, Beck has released multiple folk and country covers of songs from famous artists like Neil Young or Hank Williams.
Fingerprints from previous Beck albums like “Sea Change” and “Morning Phase” are all over this thing, which makes sense since collaborators from both albums worked on it. Usually, previous collaborators working on a new album and it sounding a little like their previous work is fine, but Beck takes it one step further and sometimes copies entire concepts, making some songs read as inferior copies.
Take the opening song “Ride Lonesome,” for example. Its opening moments are almost entirely taken from “The Golden Age,” a song from his album “Sea Change” released 22 years earlier. Both songs have similar twang on the guitars as well in multiple moments throughout their songs and even have similar lyrics describing roads and drifting away. Granted, “Ride Lonesome” is a lot more heavy-handed in describing a road and hanging on to memories, but the song still feels like a lesser version of “The Golden Age.” In turn, Beck forever relegates "Ride Lonesome” to trying to recreate an exact moment from over 20 years ago, a move that isn’t very Beck-like to me.
The rest of the album isn’t quite as egregious, but it still feels like it constantly reworks old ideas in an almost obsessive sense while never figuring out why those moments were special in the first place.
The song “For Your Love” is a prime example: it uses major elements of “Round The Bend” from “Sea Change” while not translating any of the subtlety. While it is one of the better moments on the album in terms of orchestration, “For Your Love” sounds watered-down and plain in the way that the instruments sound like they’re telling you how to feel and how to react. What was originally a moving, emotional moment in “Round The Bend” that holds its nouvelle chanson roots on its sleeve now sounds like a checkbox to hit during a romance movie.
There are some better moments in the album, though, like how the haunting but dreamy “Bleed” is one of Beck’s most genuine-sounding songs of his later career. Despite those few good moments, a lot of “Ride Lonesome” does sound like hollowed out orchestral folk taken straight from better albums of his.
I am most disappointed in the fact that it’s even a possibility that Beck rehashes music this obviously. Throughout his career, Beck has changed his sound from album-to-album in creative ways. Even if it wasn’t the best record or a huge jump, at the very least, Beck had some new ideas thrown in. “Ride Lonesome,” though, is the first example of a Beck album I can comfortably say is a lesser version of older material.
Overall, my recommendation is to just listen to “Sea Change.” It’s the superior moody, orchestral Beck album, and it has some of the most confessional moments in his entire discography.
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