Description
Beck – Odelay
Unlike Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, the indie albums that followed his debut Mellow Gold by a mere matter of months, Odelay was a full-fledged, full-bodied album, released on a major label in the summer of 1996 and bearing an intricate, meticulous production by the Dust Brothers in their first gig since the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. Odelay shared a similar collage structure to that 1989 masterpiece, relying on a blend of found sounds and samples, but instead of lending the album its primary colours, the Dust Brothers provided the accents, highlighting Beck’s ever-changing sounds, tying together his stylistic shifts, making the leaps from the dirge-blues of “Jack-Ass” to the hazy party rock of “Where’s It’s At” seem not so great.
Like Mellow Gold, Odelay winds up touching on a number of disparate strands — folk and country, grungy garage rock, stiff-boned electro, louche exotica, old-school rap, touches of noise rock — but there’s no break-neck snap between sensibilities, everything flows smoothly, the dense sounds suggesting that the songs are a bit more complicated than they actually are. Like a mosaic, all the details add up to a picture greater than its parts, so while some of Beck’s best songs are here, Odelay is best appreciated as a recorded whole, with each layered sample enhancing the allusion that came before.
Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, 180 Gram
Tracklist
A1 | Devil’s Haircut | 3:14 | |
A2 | Hotwax | 3:49 | |
A3 | Lord Only Knows | 4:15 | |
A4 | The New Pollution | 3:39 | |
A5 | Derelict | 4:13 | |
A6 | Novacane | 4:37 | |
A7 | Jack-Ass | 4:12 | |
B1 | Where It’s At | 5:30 | |
B2 | Minus | 2:32 | |
B3 | Sissyneck | 3:57 | |
B4 | Readymade | 2:37 | |
B5 | High 5 (Rock The Catskills) | 4:11 | |
B6 | Ramshackle | 4:47 |