Karaoke Weekend At The Suicide Shack

I can't believe my way back when
My Cadillac pants going much too fast
Karaoke weekend at the suicide shack
Community service and I'm still the mack  (Hotwax)

Going back to Houston
Do the hot dog dance
Going back to Houston
To get me some pants  (Lord Only Knows)

Poet, hipster seer or charlatan? I really had a thing for Beck back in ’96, he zapped in form nowhere with his hyper-articulate word spew, California cool hilltop-hop and a nice catchy line in inauthenticity. Odelay was my jam.

Yeah I know he had history and I really dug Loser* but he was suddenly the freaky funky fresh young thang, nothing like anything else, assembling music out of gloriously incompatible parts at exactly the right time, with exactly the right people. This magpie music really caught fire.

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Recorded with the Dust Brothers producing, mostly, and recorded in part at G Son Studios owned by a certain relocated NYC trio, Beck tapped into the same spirit that led to the Beastie’s glorious mélange fests.

Just spin my favourite cut ‘Where It’s At’, the only track on Odelay I ever heard played to dance to, and you can see it as a slick hick-hop country cousin to the likes of Ill Communication. Beck’s pop smarts really come to the fore here, the song is pure distilled liquid cool like a mashup of every good 70’s film soundtrack ever.

You don’t need telling about ‘Devil’s Haircut’ again, surely?

Personally I am a real sucker for the more countryfied cuts such as ‘Lord Only Knows’ – sample lyric ‘You only got one finger left and it’s pointing at the door’, ‘Sissyneck’ and the awesome ‘Jack-Ass’. It just all works so darn well, it shouldn’t but it does.

Even when Odelay takes some more discordant, leftfield turns Beck guides us through it smoothly gifting us his disembodied cool, like a friend helping you through a bad trip. I’m thinking of you ‘Derelict, with your Indonesian Tom Waits vibes and interesting percussion. You, ‘High 5 (Rock The Catskills)’ and your sharp, squelchy hip-hop noise – I’m all over it. I’m also talking to you ‘Minus’ with your cheap punker atmos and I’m all over you ‘Novacane’ with your gloriously heavy fucked up country disco.

Odelay ends with the rather lovely and heartfelt ‘Ramshackle’**, a questing rumination about home. It’s the least tricked-out cut on the LP and a great way to close things down … before you turn it over craving the driving force of ‘Devil’s Haircut’ again.

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It is also the absolute summit of Beckness for me, I dabbled in his next two LPs but nothing stuck^, nothing had that crazy paving, mosaic feel that Odelay has; that attractively haphazard serendipitous feel^^.

Odelay is that rare beast, one of those few albums I listen to thinking ‘oh, this is my favourite one’ at the beginning of almost every track. Also while there are some great individual cuts here, it works so damn well as an album – the hole being more than the sum of it’s farts, or something like that.

1029 Down.

PS: Because we deserve this:

*his earlier stuff, less so, I find it a bit of a chore mostly.

**an ovine bondage accessory? just wondering.

^and I sold them for daft amounts a few years ago.

^^which I have no doubt was painstakingly crafted by all involved.