Beck Album Recommendations: "Mellow Gold"

Album Recommendations: Mellow Gold

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Beck

[#] Mellow Gold (1994)

Finding humor in the vagrant lifestyle.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

Cue the slide guitar. Cue the drum loop. Cue the chimpanzees and the monkeys. You know "Loser", I know "Loser". It's alright! It's the classic iron lung of debut singles, what gave Beck people's ears in the first place and what he had to prove he could go far beyond. It's built of the same stuff the rest of Mellow Gold is, cheaply-recorded folk and country-inspired stream-of-consciousness rapping and singing about that junk outcast life Beck was living at the time, and yet it's too bubbly, it doesn't quite capture the psychotic, downtrodden feel the full album does. You can pretty easily tell if someone's actually listened to Beck by if they simplify him down to an ironic jokester; Mellow Gold is way too real to be ironic.

The stories of the dead-end jobs blowing leaves and making fried chicken, the violence between the shitkickin' speedtakin' truck drivers (literally caught on tape at the start of the song), the sleeping in a tool shed—these were all very real parts of Beck's life in the early 90s when these songs were variously recorded. Songs like "Whiskeyclone" and "Steal My Body Home" have a real disturbing drone to them, "Sweet Sunshine" and "Mutherfuker" are lo-fi ragers, and even the homebrew party rap of "Beercan" isn't particularly happy if you read into it. Mellow Gold is compelling precisely because it's so unpolished, a major-label album compiled from tapes recorded in various people's living rooms. I heard someone once describe it as watching the sunset from a giant tower of garbage. I quite like that.