Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too 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

[#] Modern Guilt (2008)

Dry, clipped paranoia.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

Beck's sounding awful quiet on this one. Though unintentional (his hushed vocals were the result of a back injury during the filming of the "E-Pro" video), either in a moment of serendipity or pure craftsman opportunism, Modern Guilt is similarly dry, understated, and minimal. After years of working with various big name indie producers in the Dust Brothers and Nigel Godrich, Beck's thrown his hand in with Danger Mouse on this one, and it works out more or less as well as any other Danger Mouse collab. It's moody when it bounces, heavy when it's cloudy, retro-tinged (the entire album is drenched in 60s pop worship), and maybe a little light for its short runtime. That doesn't mean it isn't quality, just that it's rather diffuse for such a maximalist musician.

Modern Guilt works its best when Beck and band counteract the sparse sounds with heavy performances. "Chemtrails" is entirely carried by Joey Waronker's intense, pounding drumwork; this may be the best drum part I've ever heard in a song! With a lighter mix and a louder vocal, "Youthless" would be remembered as one of Beck's poppiest songs (thankfully, we got something a lot more tasteful and suited). "Soul of a Man" and "Replica" are similarly effective performances, with the focus on the low end creating a smoky bed for Beck to tell his tales of orphans, jet planes, melting glaciers, trainwrecks, and suicides-by-volcano. One has to wonder where "Gamma Ray" fits into all this though.

[#] Guero (2005)

"Sun-eyed", "cyanide", it all works out the same in Beck's world.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

Drop the Odelay comparisons from your mind. Odelay has a completely different tone to Guero; Beck's first album since breaking out, the sound of a twentysomething trying to prove himself, strewn with references to being wack and living out of a suitcase to be a traveling item to gawk at (and carburators, jaundiced honchos, rec centers, and those that swing both ways, AC/DCs, but that's neither here nor there). For all the media hype about 2000s-era Beck, grown and matured as lifers entering their thirties do, reuniting with the Brothers Dust, Guero has lyrical focuses more on the world ending, whether his own ("Farewell Ride") or everyone else's ("Earthquake Weather"). A Beck album without humor sounds to some like instant mac without the cheese packet, but I find that notion overrated.

As he's good at, Beck's able to tie together space noises, grinding guitars, orchestral sections, Game Boy blips, and slinky bass with a sonic profile built for 2005 indie, not 1996 alt. Earthy is the way I'd describe it. Everything as a real gritty stomp to it, filled up with slide guitars and harmonicas, even the singles. You can imagine Beck's lowest moments, like the limping farewell "Broken Drum" or the ode-to-uselessness "Scarecrow", suit this approach best, but even his most upbeat tracks have a matching visible decay to them. Guero is what happens when music nerds use their versatility for introspection rather than humor. It might not have the "instant-fun-just-add-water" appeal of Odelay, but that would've looked tryhard a second time anyway.

[#] Mutations (1998)

A man, his guitar, and some saran wrap—all anyone ever needed.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

Abandoned hearses, rusty graves, anabolic studs, tired soldiers, impotent and blind—a cold reading of Mutations' lyrics gives the wrong impression. Given Beck's tradition in the blues (one of his trio of 1994 "debuts" was a collection of suchlike songs, one later covered by Tom Petty), you'd expect this to be a pretty downtrodden acoustic record, but you'd be wrong. This album is comfy, breezy, gentle. The songs err upbeat, the band cutting the beginnings and ends of some of the songs with bizarro instrument spasms, and with all the harmonicas and twinkling guitars, the mood is dreamily bright. Beck underscored this in an interview at the time: "When I sing about decrepitude or corrosion, I'm not sittin' at the wailin' wall. These aren't depressing things to me. They're kind of humorous, ambiguous."

Mutations is easily my favorite of Beck's albums. It's a very precise, minimalist take on the wide variety of moods Beck can pull off, each and every song never far from a memorable vocal melody or a strong image in the lyrics. You've got your meat-and-potatoes acoustic rock on "Cold Brains" and "Lazy Flies", sarcastic kiss-offs on "Cancelled Check" (and I have definitely aimed this one at people before), the start of his Brazilian trilogy on the instant classic "Tropicalia", and sure, some droopy sad sack tunes here and there—it only makes sense. It's really the dreamy tracks that hit me the hardest; the closer, a murky little number called "Static", is as much a gorgeous portrait of exhausted, resigned depression as it is Beck giving you a friendly nudge onto better things: "Get up from your bed of rest/Been a long time since you've lived".

(Big recommendation: if you like this album, seek out a copy of the German promo CD. Aside from having some extended intros and outros, the entire thing has a mix that's completely free of any loudness war nonsense—we're talking DR values into the 12s and 13s. It sounds organic and gorgeous. There's FLAC rips online, and CD copies occasionally surface on Discogs.)

[#] Odelay (1996)

Rockin' the plastic like a man from a casket.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

Beck's most celebrated album, and for good reason—this thing is a dense kaleidoscope of pop fun. This is Beck's ability to meld and juxtapose sounds on full display, with obscure 60s and 70s R&B, country, funk, and sex education samples popping up out of a mix of buzzing guitars, perky whistles, aggressive rapping, ticky-tacky drums, sensual horns, and analog keyboards. The highlights are numerous: "Hotwax"'s chorus en español, the 60s glamour of "The New Pollution", "Derelict"'s eerie rust, the dreamy, forlorn "Jack-Ass", the aggressive punk on "Minus"—all topped off with Beck rejecting the patchwork party atmosphere for a haunting, acoustic ode to homelessness on the closer "Ramshackle". Arresting stuff.

While the music is consistently fantastic, the mind-blowing thing is how it came out so damn good given the circumstances. Beck was trying to reject his new status as a flash in the pan for a novel hit in the novel nineties in session after session with various producers (the famed Beastie Boys collaborators the Dust Brothers having produced the bulk of this record), and part of the record's charm is that, through his free-association freakouts, Beck is telling that exact story, of being a human trapped in the inhumanity of the label machine. It's easy to make an album sound fun, but to make a record this studiously crafted and under this much pressure sound fun? Genuinely an impressive feat, and a record that's yet to age a day in sound or style.

[#] 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.