Beck
– Odelay
Beck’s Odelay sounds kinda like a thousand radio stations crashing into each other at full speed, only to find themselves weirdly in tune. It doesn’t chase cohesion—it weaponizes chaos. Coming off the slacker anthem “Loser,” Beck could’ve played it safe. Instead, he hauled in the Dust Brothers and went full mad scientist, stitching hip-hop beats to garage rock riffs to country twangs and mariachi horns like Frankenstein had access to a sampler.
Best of…
What makes Odelay great isn’t genre-blurring for its own sake—it’s Beck’s ability to find melody and groove inside the wreckage. These songs shouldn’t work. “Hotwax” alone flips between slide guitar and funk loops like it’s channel-surfing mid-song. But Beck doesn’t lose the thread. He keeps everything tethered to hooks—big, stupid, beautiful hooks—and lyrics that read like cut-up beat poetry filtered through a skateboarder’s zine. It’s absurd, it’s sharp, and it swings hard.
There’s also an emotional core underneath all the funhouse clutter. Beck’s voice—deadpan one minute, broken the next—grounds it. There’s alienation baked into the silliness. He’s dancing in the junkyard because that’s where the truth lives. Odelay isn’t just eclectic; it’s a mess with meaning. It’s the rare ‘90s record that sounds like its era and still refuses to be pinned down by it.
Choice Tracks
Where It’s At
A turntable preacher’s sermon. Two turntables and a microphone, sure, but also gospel organs, space bleeps, and a hook that plants itself in your brain and squats there. It’s a party and a mission statement in one.
Devils Haircut
That opening riff is a monster—chunky, swaggering, ugly in the best way. Beck delivers post-apocalyptic cowboy nonsense with confidence. You don’t need to know what it means. Just crank it and nod like you do.
The New Pollution
If Serge Gainsbourg had a boombox and a bag of weed in 1996, he might have made this. Sleazy, slinky, and draped in sax, it’s retro-futurism as dance-floor seduction.
Jack-Ass
Here Beck slows things down with a looping sample of Them’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” It’s a lonely desert waltz, drifting past you like dust. Melancholy without melodrama.
Novacane
Here’s the beast at its noisiest. A distorted, clanging, breakbeat-driven monster that sounds like Beck trying to sing through a concrete wall while the world melts behind him.