Maybe Loser is what happened to Beck, eh? Oh, well. At least Elliott Smith never got corrupted.
"But leclisse...Elliott Smith is dead. He took the easy way out, and he did heroin. I read it in Radar! Or was it Magnet. I forget."
Elliott Smith is NOT dead. He lives on an remote island with Tupac and Andy Kauffman. And they watch Russian cinema...like Heart of a Dog, which happens to be coming up next.
This is my favorite album out of the bunch. He's a Mighty Good Leader, Cyanide Breathmint...such amazing songs. What happened to this guy? I don't understand...
Originally released in 1994, One Foot in the Grave captured Beck Hansen just before he unveiled slacker anthem Loser. Since then the Los Angelino has broadly 'done a Prince' and put out a consistently funky genre-mashing body of work with only occasional dips in quality.Aside from reissuing this album with 13 previously unreleased tracks, it appears the chief reason to flog One Foot… now is to surf the 2009 sub-zeitgeist of stripped-down roots music alongside artists like Seasick Steve and Son of Dave.
Given that this raw, thrifty set has never sounded contemporary, it has aged particularly well.Beck's wry, lightly surrealistic lyrics on Asshole, ''Your brains went black when she took back her love and put it out into the sun'', give an early indication of his playful, skewed and evocative use of language.
Elsewhere the Delta blues of Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods blends acoustic slide guitar with sparse but heavy percussion to such earthy effect it's a struggle to remember the man who wrote the song was a white man in his early twenties.
There's also the great garage turbulence of Burnt Orange Peel and the Von Bondies lounge noir of Outcome to prove the album's not all about Deliverance folk.
Quality control is high on the original release with only Ziplock Bag's almost unlistenable blend of annoying distortion and tenth rate Tom Waits growling really sullying the overall piece.
Of the unreleased tracks and three former Japanese album bonus songs many are of a similarly high standard. Whiskey Can Can is a charming basic and lightly psychedelic ditty, Mattress has violently urgent acoustic strumming and shuffling percussion, while Teenage Wastebasket is great portion of primitive slacker fun, half Eels, half Velvet Underground. Of the few missteps, only Favorite Nerve seems pointlessly drab.
Technical Information:
Artist: Beck Album: One Foot in the Grave (Deluxe Edition) Year: 1994/2009
01. He's a Mighty Good Leader (2:41) 02. Sleeping Bag (2:16) 03. I Get Lonesome (2:50) 04. Burnt Orange Peel (1:39) 05. Cyanide Breath Mint (1:37) 06. See Water (2:22) 07. Ziplock Bag (1:45) 08. Hollow Log (1:54) 09. Forcefield (3:31) 10. Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods (2:55) 11. Asshole (2:32) 12. I've Seen the Land Beyond (1:41) 13. Outcome (2:10) 14. Girl Dreams (2:04) 15. Painted Eyelids (3:06) 16. Atmospheric Conditions (2:11)
Bonus tracks:
17. It's All in Your Mind (2:54) 18. Whiskey Can Can (2:13) 19. Mattress (2:32) 20. Woe On Me (3:11) 21. Teenage Wastebasket (2:28) 22. Your Love Is Weird (2:28) 23. Favorite Nerve (2:06) 24. Piss on the Door (2:05) 25. Close to God (2:28) 26. Sweet Satan (1:46) 27. Burning Boyfriend (1:13) 28. Black Lake Morning (2:26) 29. Feather in Your Cap (1:13) 30. One Foot in the Grave (3:18) 31. Teenage Wastebasket (1:27) 32. I Get Lonesome (1:56)
Oh God! Now every Indie fuck on earth is going to be haunting this sight because of these Beck posts. Ugh. I'm gonna have to buck up with some David Alan Coe in the next few days to scare 'em off.
Wait! Indie fucks don't know how to deal with FLAC files. Nevermind. Enjoy more Beck!
01. Pink Noise (Rock Me Amadeus) (2:57) 02. Rowboat (3:45) 03. Thunder Peel (1:49) 04. Waitin' for a Train (1:09) 05. The Spirit Moves Me (2:10) 06. Crystal Clear (Beer) (2:30) 07. (Untitled) (0:06) 08. No Money No Honey (2:07) 09. 8.6.82 (0:38) 10. Total Soul Future (Eat It) (1:48) 11. One Foot in the Grave (1:58) 12. (Untitled) (0:17) 13. (Untitled) (0:32) 14. Aphid Manure Heist (0:58) 15. Today Has Been a Fucked Up Day (2:34) 16. 'Rollins Power Sauce' (1:54) 17. Puttin It Down (2:24) 18. 11.6.45 (0:31) 19. Cut 1/2 Blues (2:37) 20. Jagermeister Pie (1:08) 21. Ozzy (2:06) 22. Dead Wild Cat (0:26) 23. Satan Gave Me a Taco (3:46) 24. 8.4.82 (0:26) 25. Tasergun (3:52) 26. Modesto (20:08)
It's funny how things fall into place sometimes. Last night I was looking for a lossless version of dios' (not Dio, d-i-o-s) first album, and then I read on some blog that Joel Morales, dios' lead singer and guitarist is in the process of making a Beck tribute album called When Beck Was Cool. Now, I knew that Beck with his dick in the dirt (Sea Change) was cool, but I wasn't sure any other of his work was. I was wrong, and these four posts will prove my wrongitudiness.
I still haven't found that first dios album in lossless (I used to have it,I swear, but it got stolen), but the journey has transformed me into a '93 to '94 (and Sea Change) fair-weathered Beck fan. Oh, how the tables turn. Enjoy some early Beck!
Before Mellow Gold and even before A Western Harvest Field By Moonlight, there was Golden Feelings, an extremely limited-edition, cassette-only collection of songs. Re-released in 1999, this 17-track collection documents Beck's first officially released, self-recorded, full-length album of four-track noodlings and documents his genius in embryo. Like Stereopathetic Soul Manure, Golden Feelings features muddy production values, an array of taped TV and music blurbs, and entertaining between-track dialogues and noises. The opening cut "The Fucked Up Blues" is a fine early example of Beck's surrealist blues; some songs, such as "Magic Station Wagon," which sounds like two broken guitars being plucked violently over and over for some sort of percussive effect, are more interesting than listenable. The folkish "No Money No Honey" -- which also appeared on Stereopathetic Soul Manure, sung by a homeless man Beck recruited -- appears here in a more developed version and features what must be one of the loudest, most distorted acoustic guitar tracks ever recorded. The primitive Velvet Underground-meets-Jon Spencer Blues Explosion garage rock of "Schmoozer," as well as the humorous folk narrative of "Heartland Feeling," are some of his strongest songs to date. Dark, haunting ballads like "Super Golden Black Sunchild," the country-blues of "Gettin' Home," and an early attempt at funk on "People Gettin' Busy" round out a very eclectic set. An early, even more distorted version of Mellow Gold's "Mutherfukka" is also included. Overall, Golden Feelings is an extremely interesting, entertaining, and humorous document that proves that from the start Beck had his heart set on making experimentation his only gimmick.
Technical Information:
Artist: Beck Album: Golden Feelings Year: 1993/1999
01 The Fucked Up Blues (2:12) 02 Special People (1:43) 03 Magic Stationwagon (1:36) 04 No Money No Honey (2:36) 05 Trouble All My Days (2:07) 06 Bad Energy (1:39) 07 Schmoozer (2:38) 08 Heartland Feeling (7:11) 09 Super Golden Black Sunchild (2:11) 10 Soul Sucked Dry (1:50) 11 Feelings (1:35) 12 Gettin Home (4:15) 13 Will I Be Ignored By The Lord (2:00) 14 Bogus Soul (1:16) 15 Totally Confused (2:00) 16 Mutherfukka (2:44) 17 People Gettin Busy
I've never been a big fan of Beck, but I'll be damned if when he's got his dick in the dirt he comes up with a break-up album that rivals Blood on the Tracks. Beck is stripped bare in Sea Change, and the only redemption from being broken to pieces is a deserted road. Isn't it amazing what an artist can do when he parks his ego for an album? Too bad Beck has only pulled this off once in his career.
In 1994, Beck Hansen released his first major-label album. He called it Mellow Gold, and we all laughed at the irony: slacker caricature and coffeehouse hip-hop billed like a K-tel makeout platter. But Sea Change, his eighth album, is the real thing — a perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open heart.
It's the best album Beck has ever made, and it sounds like he's paid dearly for the achievement. He reportedly wrote these twelve wine-dark songs after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. Significantly, two of Beck's finest songs of the last decade were also pristine love-sucks blues: "Asshole," on his '94 garage-folk detour, One Foot in the Grave, and the raga moan "Nobody's Fault but My Own," on 1998's Mutations. Sea Change, gleaming with twang and heartbroken strings, is an entire album of spectacular suffering.
This kind of candor does not come easily even to great record makers, and Beck, one of our sharpest, has never had much cause for such direct reflection. The satirical impatience and throbbing collage of his most commercial work — Mellow Gold, 1996's Odelay, the '99 pillow-talk pastiche Midnite Vultures — has always been more exhilarating than touching, a triumph of guarded magnificence. But you can clearly hear Beck banging between bravado and paralysis all over Sea Change. He gives his departing other a grand send-off at the start of the album, in "The Golden Age" ("Put your hands on the wheel/Let the golden age begin"), then fills the rest of the song with his own fear of going nowhere fast: "These days I barely get by/I don't even try." Compared to other titles here, such as "Lost Cause" and "Already Dead," "Guess I'm Doing Fine" is happy talk. In fact, Beck is doing anything but; the low, slow way he sings on his way to the song's punch line — "It's only tears that I'm crying/It's only you that I'm losing/Guess I'm doing fine" — is a powerful admission of failure.
The clarity of his crisis has a lot to do with the naked strength of Beck's singing. For someone who started out as a teenage folk hobo — just voice and strum — Beck has rarely walked this far out in front of the music on his own records. And considering his eternal-high-school looks, he possesses a surprisingly manly tenor, a clean, deep instrument of lust and worry. It fills the big spaces in Nigel Godrich's haunted production — the backward-tape buzz in "Lost Cause"; the desert-Bach air of the keyboards in "Nothing I Haven't Seen" — with the combined pathos of Nick Drake, the solo, freaked-out Syd Barrett and the John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band. When Beck and Godrich pour on the Indo-Beatles chaos in "Sunday Sun" — ghostly pounding piano and not-so-unison guitar; a meltdown coda of drums and distortion — you can still hear Beck's resignation and unsteady resurrection inside the song.
The Drake and Barrett comparisons are not idle flattery. Just as Mutations was Beck's homage to Tropicalia — Brazil's late-1960s revolution in art, sound and romanticism — Sea Change suggests that Beck has been studying the British early-1970s school of psychedelic-comedown melancholy. The coal-gray cry of string arrangements by Beck's father, David Campbell, in "Lonesome Tears" and "Round the Bend" recall Robert Kirby's exquisite orchestrations on Drake's 1969 album Five Leaves Left. Godrich, who as a producer and engineer helped put the Pink Floyd in Radiohead, shows the same flair here for shadows and suspense. Beck made this record with a full band, including guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboard player Roger Manning and drummer Joey Waronker. Yet on every song, it sounds like Beck is the only one in the room, alone with his questions and stumped for answers.
When Beck recently performed at New York's Lincoln Center, he mixed some of these new songs with breathtaking covers of "No Expectations," by the Rolling Stones," Big Star's "Kangaroo," the Zombies' "Beechwood Park" and "Sunday Morning," by the Velvet Underground. It was a perfect fit — songs about commitment and loss, written and sung by the wounded. Beck didn't play any Dylan, but he didn't have to. As a young folk singer at the turn of the Nineties, Beck set out to be his own Dylan. With Sea Change, he has made it the hard way, creating an impeccable album of truth and light from the end of love. This is his Blood on the Tracks.
01. The Golen Age (4:47) 02. Paper Tiger (4:42) 03. Guess I'm Doing Fine (4:58) 04. Lonesome Tears (5:40) 05. Lost Cause (3:52) 06. End of the Day (5:08) 07. It's All In Your Mind (3:10) 08. Round the Bend (5:25) 09. Already Dead (3:20) 10. Sunday Sun (4:47) 11. Little One (4:30) 12. Side of the Road (3:31) 13. Bonus: Ship in the Bottle (3:23)
