Jeff Beck
There and Beck

Recommending an album by Jeff Beck is quite complicated, "There and Beck" represents, according to my very personal analysis, a good compromise between the '70s Beck fusion and the new-old Beck rock.
Accompanied by Simon Phillips on drums, Tony Hymas and Jan Hammer on keyboards... (the same keyboards with which he clashes and interacts on various occasions) the album is predominantly jazzy-fusion but with new surprises...

It starts with "Star Cycle" with the classic exchange of riffs between guitar and keyboard, landings with the lever and new flashy elements: the final solo at 4:30 is a first example.
"Too Much To Lose" is a light and dreamy track where Beck's guitar begins to distinguish itself with a slightly funky sound; the continuation, "You Never Know", seems like theme 2 where a heavier jazzy feel emerges, perhaps due to the keyboards that have a lot here. A higher gain would have revealed Beck's lovable rawness hidden (perhaps deliberately...?)

"The Pump" features Tony Hymas on keyboards getting closer to what I define as "Beck's territory" where the solos gain more intensity (2:30) with changes in timbre (2:46').

Here is the album's masterpiece: "Elbecko!". In my opinion, the novelty of the album, the rock chart piece, although instrumental. The intelligent pairing of guitar and keyboard like a piano. The introductory solo seems to open a story, full of pathos, followed by a rock "race". Perhaps too much '80s video game music with a pesky Beck...Here there are some flashy licks that pave the way for the ethnic sounds that Beck will propose in the future (from Flash onwards to be precise), listen from minute 3:01 to approximately 3:06...
"The Golden Road" is the typical soft-light ballad (bed), important to note at 3:12 the "violin" effect a la Beck (volume swell) to then finish with a wild matter...
"Space Boogie" on the other hand winks at Cobham's Spectrum(perhaps more than all of Beck's other intentions since Blow By Blow!).The track opens with the hypnotic rhythms of Simon Phillips on drums and with the two "keyboards" chasing each other, undoubtedly this is the jazz track of the album par excellence.

It all concludes with "The Final Piece" a delicate instrumental track with an Irish sound and for Beck, it represents a novelty. In fact, it seems the prelude to tracks like "Declan" ("Who Else!" 1999) or "Where Were You" ... and, perhaps, in the end, it's the track that allows you to savor Beck's future sound: harmonics worked with the lever and soft flutterings. Let's say that alongside El Becko this track represents the total departure from fusion territories (Blow by Blow and Wired) which Beck years later will label as "errors on record..."

Paradoxically, the album seems to be "normalized", in fact, the dynamics that distinguish Beck's records here are "flattened", there are, in short, no "gain" outputs of the previous "Wired".

In summary, we have very soft sounds, sometimes, like a soundtrack, at times aggressive (hidden) and hypnotic.
In my humble opinion, this work serves as a "watershed" between his '70s "fusion" works and those of the '80s-90s.
Excellent purchase.