Word: becks
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MUTATIONS Beck Geffen Records...
...went so well the last time, but that only makes the pressure even greater. You have to live up to that great first impression, every nuance can suddenly turn self-conscious and, worst of all, you can finally make that big blunder that you miraculously avoided last time round. Beck's new album, Mutations, suffers from these post-success symptoms all over the place. Rather than depart too much from his established persona or strain too hard to maintain his position at the forefront of the electronica vanguard, Beck holds back like a worried date, making minimal headway in order...
...last date with Beck Hansen, his smash album Odelay, was one of those classic affairs in which everything seemed to go perfectly. God knows we weren't expecting it. Last time we checked, he had been merely a folksy geek with the catchphrase of consummate apathy: "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill...
Catchy, sure, but do you really want to bring him home to meet the folks? Still, against all odds, on Odelay, Beck managed to pull from his grab bag of idiosyncracies something somehow coherent, edgy and adorable all at the same time. Maybe it was the lovable geeky cowboy thing, or all that talk of him capturing the zeitgeist. Truth be told, we always did grin at that line about him being a loser and he always had been something of a likable maverick. His first album, Mellow Gold, introduced his sound: blending rural rockabilly and urban jangle into...
However, moving from mellow acoustic ramblings into ingenious electronic sound collage, Beck demanded everyone's undivided attention with Odelay. Collaborating with the Dust Brothers-whose everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production methods had already revolutionized the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique--Beck crafted an album that sounded like it came from somewhere between Memphis, Manhattan and Mars. The country rambler was still here, but now he was hobnobbing with bubbling psychedelic guitars, booming hip-hop tracks and distorted space-age bleeps. Splashed through with enough classic soul samples to put Stax Records back in business, Odelay was a manifesto...