Beck - "Looking for a Sign"

A new Beck song! Which is great, except for the fact that if it wasn't for movie soundtracks, this guy wouldn't really be recording any new music of his own these days. It's been four years since his last full-length, Modern Guilt, and the last original Beck compositions that we've had were the handful of songs he wrote for the Scott Pilgrim movie back in 2010. And since then it's just been the Record Club covers project -- which itself has been pretty quiet lately -- and his roles as producer in 2011 for Thurston Moore and Stephen Malkmus. Yes, it's been a little too quiet from the Beck camp lately. Well there are finally some rumblings of activity: a new Beck song, this time a contribution to the soundtrack to Jeff Who Lives at Home, the new film directed by Jay and Mark Duplass and starring Jason Segel (yeah, I know, another post that references Jason Segel -- weird). The new track is called "Looking for a Sign," and apparently Beck has been looking for that sign somewhere in Neil Young's Harvest and in his own seminal 2002 breakup record Sea Change, because this song sounds like those two records had a baby. And normally I don't like babies, but this baby I like. Let's hope this is a glimpse of full-length Beck record to-come later this year. It certainly sounds like the Beck we've all been missing.