Morning Phase is the beginning of yet another amazing chapter in Beck's career. Featuring musicians who have backed him on many of his most acclaimed albums, as well as the current live shows widely hailed as the best of his career, Morning Phase harkens back to the stunning harmonies, song craft and staggering emotional impact of Beck's most classic ballads, all the while surging forward with undeniable optimism.

2015 Grammy Award Winner for: Album Of The Year / Best Rock Album / Best Engineered Album, Non Classical

Rated 9/10 Music and 9/10 Sound by Michael Fremer (Analog Planet)

Featured in Vinyl Gourmet Audiophile TOP 100

• 180 Gram Audiophile Vinyl
• Mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering
• Cut by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Studios
• Pressed at Pallas in Germany
• Includes Download Code

Morning Phase is the 5x Grammy-nominated twelfth studio album by musical chameleon Beck and the long awaited follow-up to 2008's Modern Guilt. Described as a companion piece of sorts to his benchmark, largely-acoustic 2002 album Sea Change, the Capitol Records release is true to its title and stands as the beginning of yet another amazing chapter in Beck's peerless career and catalog.

Featuring musicians who have backed him on many of his most acclaimed albums including Sea Change, as well as the current live shows widely hailed as the best of his career (Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Joey Waronker, Smokey Hormel, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Jason Falkner), Morning Phase harkens back to the stunning harmonies, song craft and staggering emotional impact of Beck's most classic ballads, all the while surging forward with undeniable optimism.

The sonically lush 13-song set is anchored by the impassioned lead single "Blue Moon," which serves as a fine introduction and the ideal embodiment of the album's many influences which range from Scott Walker and Love to The Byrds, Crosby Stills & Nash, Gram Parsons and Neil Young.  

"The album itself plays like a California drive, twisting and turning with an ever-present destination in mind, certainly drawing from the same reflective state as Sea Change...Perhaps the most pleasant thing about the record is how truly organic it feels for Hansen to revisit that headspace, and how eloquently it’s executed." - Revolt

"...That album (Morning Phase), his first in five years, is "California music," as Beck says before the show, sitting in the garden of his Buenos Aires hotel. When he makes any album, he explains, "I'm just fumbling around with chords and a mood. Hopefully something emerges." This time, he goes on, "the songs are coming out of a California tradition. I'm hearing the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Gram Parsons, Neil Young – the bigger idea of what that sound is to me.

That is an apt description of Beck's trip through the gently psychedelic suspense and warming cosmic-cowboy reflection on Morning Phase. There are combined echoes of mid-Sixties Scott Walker and Love's Forever Changes in the slow bloom of the opening hymn "Wave." "Blackbird Chain," with its milky jangle and dewy strings, and the plaintive "Unforgiven" evoke 1968's Notorious Byrd Brothers and the floating introspection of David Crosby's 1971 classic, If I Could Only Remember My Name.

There are similarities in texture, velocity and personnel to Beck's quiet 2003 masterpiece, Sea Change. Beck, who produced Morning Phase, made it with the band from the former record – the same guys on stage with him in Buenos Aires – while his father, Sea Change orchestrator David Campbell, returned to help with brass and string arrangements. But Beck is loathe to use the word "sequel" to characterize Morning Phase. "It was going back to the same place," he says, "and seeing where we're all at, like those Seven Up! movies, where they go back and see those people every seven years.

There is a fresh, expansive complexity to the grace and details on Morning Phase: the Caribbean-flavored power pop of "Blue Moon"; the strutting banjo that recalls Beck's teenage blues-hobo years in "Say Goodbye"; the Leslie-guitar crescendo at the end of "Waking Light," summoning the spirit of George Harrison's soloing in the Beatles' "Let It Be." Morning Phase also has a specific, thematic weight. All 12 songs are set in dawn's early light, those hours of awakening and reckoning at the start of each day when a relationship can founder, end or begin anew..." - Rolling Stone

Track Listing:

Side A
1. Cycle
2. Morning
3. Heart Is A Drum
4. Say Goodbye
5. Blue Moon
6. Unforgiven

Side B
1. Wave
2. Don't Let It Go
3. Blackbird chain
4. Phase
5. Turn Away
6. Country Down
7. Waking Light

Click here to listen to samples on YouTube.com ♫