Beck Album Recommendations: "Odelay"

Album Recommendations: Odelay

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

[#] 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.