For his unaffected exuberance, fervent eclecticism, precocious ingenuity and stubborn refusal to take himself too seriously, Beck Hansen is rock & roll's Man of the Year – even if he looks as if he's only 12 years old. "Loser" quickly made him a star; it nearly made him a cliché. There is nothing more annoying in the fast-forward, content-vacuum whirl of alternative music than a smart-aleck surrealist drunk on hip-hop
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and his own irony. Beck's Dylan-esque lyric wiles and junkyard-pop craftsmanship on the 1994 album
Mellow Gold hinted at greater things.
Odelay delivers – without making a big fuss about it. Beck and his co-producers, the Dust Brothers, shuffle and sling purloined drum licks, classy cameo appearances (jazz bassist Charlie Haden) and
very obscure samples (hands up, everybody who remembers the early '70s funk band Rasputin's Stash) with a blithe self-assurance that belies the combustible potential of their juxtapositions. Beck raps about taking care of business "with two turntables and a microphone," but in "Novocane," he does it through a filter of phlegmlike distortion placed over a gnarly bed of glutinous R&B bass, haywire electronics, outbursts of fucked-up-guitar chaos and what sounds like modem static. "Jack-Ass" isn't half as dense, and much of its light, swinging charm comes from a sample of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (as recorded by Them –
très hip), yet its hazy blend of spaced country romanticism and Beck's modestly plaintive singing ("I've been drifting along/In the same stale, old shoes") is too moving to merit such a throwaway song title. Actually, Beck's finest lyrically and emotionally consistent album is his 1994 acoustic detour,
One Foot in the Grave, on K Records. When Beck figures out how to marry that kind of elemental drama with all the other weirdness, he'll really be dangerous. (RS 750/751)
DAVID FRICKE
