When Beck first released Odelay in 1996, it was to both a very eager and excited audience and to critics just waiting to sharpen their claws. The success of “Loser” earned the singer an advance critical chorus of “probable one-hit wonder” or, given the deluge of small-potatoes material in between Mellow Gold and Odelay, at most critics like Eric Weisbard of Spin were charitable enough to call him a “one-album wonder.” Beck was staring down the barrel of a monstrous critical cannon that was just waiting for him to screw up to justify lighting the fuse.
He didn’t. Odelay was a runaway success with critics earning Grammy wins for “Best Male Rock Vocal Performance” for “Where It’s At” and “Best Alternative Music Performance” for the album itself. It peaked on the Billboard Top 200 at number 16 too and boasted four singles which each charted in Billboard Hot 100 between 1996 and 1997. For fans, the record reprised Beck’s role as the channel-surfing slacker except this time on steroids and a healthy dose of angelic Dust Brothers magic.
To coin a phrase, at the time of Mellow Gold, Beck was perceived as the good-natured man-child; but after the release of Odelay, the singer asserted himself in the public and critical eye as a laidback übermensch.
Twelve years after Beck’s ascension and Odelay remains untouched by both time and anyone that pretends himself to be the singer’s peer, partially because the album is just that well-made and because it goes in so many directions at once that the songs—either separately of combined—defy easy classification and refuse to be pinned down. What, for example, do you call a song like “The New Pollution”? In between seconds, it’s a glittering monolith of lounge, pussy-cat swing, stream-of-consciousness free-style and TV commercial cheesiness. That’s a mouthful even in print.
The melodies on “Novacane,” “Hotwax,” “Readymade” and “Minus” sound tentative and half-finished as the singer’s voice often trails off at the end of lines like “Yo soy un disco quebrado / Yo tengo chicle en mi cerebro” (direct translation: “I am a dial broken / I have chewing gum in my brain") but it works here. The lines might not rhyme or make sense, but Beck’s sibilance works with them to make the listener’s brain fill in the gaps and thus making ballads of beautiful words seem not only intelligible, but anthemic in a strange way.
The weirdness continues with three tracks appended to the original album’s track list here (“Deadweight” appeared on the Life Less Ordinary soundtrack, but “Inferno” and “Gold Chains” have gone unreleased until now). “Deadweight” is still the perennially disquieting tune in Beck’s songbook from the era. With far more coherent lyrics than anywhere on the original release of Odelay, and a shopping-mall muzak refrain combined with Spanish-sounding guitar, the song foreshadows the delirium of “Tropicalia” (which appeared two years later on Mutations) and remarkably poppy dalliances of Midnite Vultures while still retaining the flow and all-encompassing retro stabs at overly modern sounds of Odelay. If that doesn’t exactly make sense, envision a cybernetic ‘57 Chevy with hovering capability and you’ll get the idea; Odelay was, after all, one of the first records made with Pro Tools and, with that information in hand, it suddenly becomes easy to understand the clash of modern sonics with vintage aesthetics that drives the whole record.
In some ways, it’s easy to understand why “Inferno” was left off of the original Odelay release. Granted, the heavy beats, schizophrenic production and fast-as-hell free-styling vocals have a place among these songs and Beck’s self-referencing in the lyrics sums up the content of Odelay nicely, but the track feels superfluous given that the singer explored all of the sounds in this single song over the course of the album’s fourteen others. “Inferno” sounds as if the entire feel of the album was condensed into one seven-minute epic—almost like a Cliff’s Notes approach to Odelay or the song that could have been used to promote the album in a commercial. It works, but isn’t essential.
“Gold Chains” is something completely different. Swirling country western “geetars” and harmonica cut with some gangsta boasting and a spat vocal delivery are at the core of this song while the rest of the stray sparks of energy that fly from it vibrate with conceptual flow and roll on the cybernetic sounding grooves laid out by The Dust Brothers. Again however, while the song is great, it’s understandable why it was left off of Odelay. The shiny production and tidy, seamless nature of the parts in the mix are flawless and hence not anything like the rest of the album at all. While very well done, it would have derailed the vibe that the album established; for fans though, it is an excellent glimpse into where the album could have ended up had Beck been allowed to tweak all of the songs further.
Disc two of this special edition, however, is where Beck takes Odelay off the map completely. A weird collection of B-sides, rarities and outtakes, disc two pulls everything imaginable from the sessions that ultimately yielded Odelay together in a fairly haphazard but interesting mix. Fans will recognize a fair number of songs (“Clock” appeared on a special disc attached to an issue of NME, a more polished demo of “Thunder Peel” returns from the Stereopathetic wasteland and also explains the song’s entry into the Odelay tour set lists) but, for the uninitiated, the CD yields a treasure trove of oddities that could only have been B-sides for a major label artist (“Burro” is a flamenco-injected push through “Jack-Ass” complete with a Spanish-translated lyric sheet), but are excellent distractions from the original release. Opening with a series of three monstrously overworked versions of a couple of the blockbuster hits (unfortunately U.N.K.L.E.’s remix of “Where It’s At” lasts 12 minutes, Aphex Twin’s altered version of “Devil’s Haircut” can only be characterized as E-drenched masturbation and Mickey P’s crack at the same song could have been dropped in favour of the DJ’s fantastic ambient reworking of “New Pollution”), the disc immediately improves as the more-finished-than-you’d-expect discarded songs that follow instantly take on lives of their own. Often more underground informed in both sound and production (“Electric Music and the Summer People” sounds like a throwback to Mellow Gold –complete with click track–as does “SA-5” and the subdued acoustic “Feather In Your Cap” hearkens back to “Pay No Mind” while “Erase The Sun” re-examines No Wave), the songs are usually only ideas half sketched and committed to tape for posterity or to be referred to later on the off-chance that some portion of them could be used (the “I get down all the way” refrain from “Clock” wound up manifesting on “Hotwax” for example) but it’s unlikely that any of them were ever intended for mass consumption.
As stated, they are song sketches, but some are more finished than others and thus of more interest. “Strange Invitation,” for example, is a more straightforward and real-time version of “Jack-Ass” that’s more conventionally rockist in structure and “Brother” is a fantastic ballad that hints at Beck’s innate songwriting ability better than anything that appeared on either Mellow Gold or Odelay, “Devil Got My Woman” is a busted blues demo, and “Trouble All My Days” is a lame horse of a no-waver that would have been considered the weak link on Mellow Gold too. Realistically, the tracks on the second disc in this set that didn’t also appear on a larger scale elsewhere (like “Clock” and “Thunder Peel”) are vault material for completists or curiosity seekers only. Happily though, this review is being written by both a completist and a curiosity seeker and, with that said, this reissue is definitely worth a listen.
More on Beck here: www.beck.com
Odelay (Deluxe Edition) is out now on Geffen.
