424. Beck, "Odelay"

 


Can you separate the artist from the art?  I know I don't really listen to Ryan Adams any more since it came out that he's a sex pest who continually preyed on  younger women.  I mean, I didn't have any CDs to throw away but I unstarred all his albums on Spotify, SO THERE.  I just can't listen to it knowing what I know now.  

Beck is apparently a Scientologist and I'd be lying if I didn't say that this fact colored my appreciation of his work once I found it out.  I mean, I'm generally distrustful of all organized religion, but Scientology is especially nutty and predatory to boot.  

But I put all that aside and tried to listen to this album fresh and guess what?  It's great.  It's a great album.  Let's set aside the 3 songs you probably already know ("Devil's Haircut," "The New Pollution," and "Where It's At"), and focus on some of the other tracks first.  "Jack-Ass," based around a sample from Them's cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," is a lovely meditation on not letting things go.  "Lord Only Knows" has kind of a chopped and screwed "Sweet Virginia" vibe.  There was obviously a lot of in-studio experimentation, which is kind of what you'd expect when the Dust Brothers are producing.  You can really hear it on "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)," an aggressively slammed-together song built from the ground up on samples and drum machines.

The whole feel of the album is kind of moody and atmospheric.  Like a lot of Beck's stuff, it seems purposefully inscrutable.  It's not as obvious a breakup record as "Sea Change," but it seems like a breakup record.  Not just breaking up with a person; breaking up with life.  "Ramshackle," for example, is a broody, sad tale of "flypaper towns/stuck together, one and all."  Is it about stasis or restlessness?  Impossible to tell.  Let's just stay a while and try to figure it out.

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