The influences are declared cheerfully: MGMT's lopsided grandeur, the bookish whimsy of They Might Be Giants, the sun-bleached hooks of Foster The People. Plenty of bedroom auteurs have gone shopping in that aisle and left with nothing but novelty. Beck takes the same ingredients and stirs in something heavier. Dirges, he admits with a shrug, and the shrug is the best joke in the whole campaign. A dirge is the last thing anyone expects to find humming under a pop single, yet it lends the song a gravity that its brighter cousins rarely dare. The melodies lift, the arrangement glitters, and underneath it all a slow funeral march keeps time, as though the party were being held in a cathedral crypt and everyone had decided to make the best of it.

That tension is the song's engine. Beck layers his sounds with the patience of a man restoring a church window, and the track rewards the sort of listening that makes the bus journey home feel too short. Nothing is rushed. By his own account the song took ages to write, and he found the words on long, contemplative walks, a method with a distinguished lineage that runs from Wordsworth to Weller. You can hear the mileage. The lyrics refuse to sit still and explain themselves. Ask Beck what the song means and he offers only that it can be taken a number of ways and the interpretation is yours. In an industry that now demands a thread, a think-piece and a brand statement with every three-minute single, such reticence is almost punk.

Yet the song is far from cold or cryptic for its own sake. Its title nods towards the celestial, and Beck's spiritual preoccupations hum throughout, voiced in his own plain-spoken way: the spirit world is real, we choose where we fit within it, and we choose through our actions. He says it without pulpit thunder, more like a neighbour leaning on the fence, and that humility keeps the music from curdling into sermon. The advice to choose wisely and choose early gives a record already rich in atmosphere a spine of real conviction.

Part of the appeal is the sheer self-sufficiency on display. Asked what makes the release stand out, Beck answered, with admirable economy, "I wrote it." Hardly a manifesto, yet hearing the finished article you begin to think it will do. Every texture, every sly harmony, every shadow falling across a bright chorus bears one man's fingerprints, and the coherence that results is something committees and expensive studios routinely fail to buy.

The charm lies in the slight eccentricity, the sense of a gifted obsessive following his own compass and trusting that somebody, somewhere, will fall in step. On this evidence, plenty will. *Bright And Morningstar* is mysterious without being obscure, melancholy without self-pity, and playful without once winking at the audience. It sounds like an artist who has taken his time and found, at the end of all those walks, exactly the words he was looking for.

Baby Tapir is a name to remember, and this is a single to play twice in a row.