Unlike Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, the indie albums that followed his debut Mellow Gold by a mere matter of months, Odelay was a full-fledged, full-bodied album, released on a major label in the summer of 1996 and bearing an intricate, meticulous production by the Dust Brothers in their first gig since the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. Odelay shared a similar collage structure to that 1989 masterpiece, relying on a blend of found sounds and samples, but instead of lending the album its primary colors, the Dust Brothers provided the accents, highlighting Beck's ever-changing sounds, tying together his stylistic shifts, making the leaps from the dirge-blues of "Jack-Ass" to the hazy party rock of "Where's It's At" seem not so great. Like Mellow Gold, Odelay winds up touching on a number of disparate strands -- folk and country, grungy garage rock, stiff-boned electro, louche exotica, old-school rap, touches of noise rock -- but there's no break-neck snap between sensibilities, everything flows smoothly, the dense sounds suggesting that the songs are a bit more complicated than they actually are. Most of the songs here betray Beck's roots as an anti-folk singer -- he reworks blues structures ("Devil's Haircut"), country ("Lord Only Knows," "Sissyneck"), soul ("Hotwax"), folk ("Ramshackle") and rap ("High 5 [Rock the Catskills]," "Where It's At") -- but each track twists conventions, either in their construction or presentation, giving this a vibrant, electric pulse, surprising in its form and attack. Like a mosaic, all the details add up to a picture greater than its parts, so while some of Beck's best songs are here, Odelay is best appreciated as a recorded whole, with each layered sample enhancing the allusion that came before.
Odelay
Beck
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Odelay Review
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Track Listing
Title/Composer | Performer | Time | Stream | |||
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1 | Beck | 03:14 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
2 | Beck | 03:49 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
3 | Beck | 04:15 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
4 | Beck | 03:40 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
5 | Beck | 04:13 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
6 | Beck | 04:38 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
7 | Beck | 04:12 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
8 |
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Beck | 05:31 | SpotifyAmazon | ||
9 | Beck | 02:32 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
10 | Beck | 03:53 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
11 | Beck | 02:37 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
12 | Beck | 04:11 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
13 |
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Beck | 07:32 | SpotifyAmazon |