Geffen
Produced by Beck, the Dust Brothers, Mario Caldato Jr, Brian Paulson, Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf
Released: June 1996
TRACKLISTING
01 Devil’s Haircut
02 Hotwax
03 Lord Only Knows
04 The New Pollution
05 Derelict
06 Novacane
07 Jack-Ass
08 Where It’s At
09 Minus
10 Sissyneck
11 Readymade
12 High 5 (Rock the Catskills)
13 Ramshackle
One grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, another was a visual collage artist. On Odelay, the groundbreaking 1996 album that unexpectedly established him as a major artist, the impish singer-songwriter Beck paid tribute to both sides of his lineage. Painstakingly developed – Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus joked that the title was a play on ‘oh delay’ – the album was a masterfully casual assemblage of hip-hop grooves and bluesy spiritualism, generational tweaks and digital freak-outs. Odelay was an end of the world party where you could dance until the strangeness got too much, and even then it was as intriguing when you were horizontal as vertical.
Beck Hansen had been a street musician in Europe and then Los Angeles, where he crashed open mic nights and developed a sonic hobo aesthetic that came to fruition with 1994’s ‘Loser’, a playful send-up of Generation X angst that started out as a joke and ended up as a salve once Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain committed suicide. He used trashed drum machines and rapped in a dulled monotone, which might have suggested a malaise if he wasn’t putting out multiple albums a year on various labels.
Odelay was, in various ways, Beck’s attempt to consolidate his career. His second release for a major label (he’d reportedly signed to DGC for less money and more creative independence), it began as an acoustic record – and elements of that approach remain – but the sessions finally hit their stride when he hooked up with co-producers and co-writers the Dust Brothers, who had a history in hip-hop and were able to make sonic sense of Beck’s eclectic ear. Odelay was the first Beck album where the sounds didn’t lag behind his imagination. He didn’t have to use limitations to define his songs, and the result is richly evocative.
The tunes could be wicked on the body. The female subject of Beck’s fascination on ‘The New Pollution’ is essayed via a rhythm track of precise bass and a drum loop predicated on a sweet snare sound that gives way to an expertly spotted sax break – from Joe Thomas’ ‘Venus’ – that sounded like the most rhapsodic of dreams alongside a woman who’s ‘got a hand on the wheel of pain’. As the grunge era’s vast rage settled into inchoate angst, Beck was a wordsmith who used detailed imagery to dazzle and obscure quiet truths.
‘I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?’ was the oft-shared refrain from his breakthrough single, but on Odelay Beck had a far more complex persona; one that required the audience to attune to his swaying vocal flow, which sometimes felt as if it would lose track of the beat but seemed to finish every line exactly where it should. ‘Something’s wrong ’cause my mind is fading/And everywhere I look/There’s a dead end waiting’, were the album’s opening lines on ‘Devil’s Haircut’, and amid the pop-art poetry and surrealist imagery (‘Stealing kisses from the leprous faces’, the same verse announced) Beck was ready to laugh until he cried.
Every track was a journey into sound, with ‘Novacane’ linking funk grinds and CB radio vocals to a sweet guitar lick and digital squawks, while the barely feeling the gravity vibe of ‘Where It’s At’ aligned a narcotised keyboard loop to what could be the album’s motto: ‘I got two turntables and a microphone’. By way of contrast there’s ‘Jack-Ass’, an autumnal psychedelic pop ballad, and the Stonesy country lament ‘Lord Only Knows’. Put together it was a radical leap of faith, not to mention a success that Beck has never quite been able to duplicate, and the artist knew exactly what he’d come up with. As he declares on ‘Jack-Ass’, ‘I’ll put it together. It’s a strange invitation.’