1. Devils Haircut

2. Hotwax

3. Lord Only Knows

4. New Pollutionthe

5. Derelict

6. Novacane

7. Jack-Ass

8. Where It's At

9. Minus

10. Sissyneck

11. Readymade

12. High 5 (Rock The Catskills)

13. Ramshackle

Rolling Stone

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 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.

All Music

Beck's debut, Mellow Gold, was a glorious sampler of different musical styles, careening from lo-fi hip-hop to folk, moving back through garage rock and arty noise. It was an impressive album, but the parts didn't necessarily stick together. The two albums that followed within months of Mellow Gold — Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave — were specialist releases that disproved the idea that Beck was simply a one-hit wonder. But Odelay, the much-delayed proper follow-up to Mellow Gold, proves the depth and scope of his talents. Odelay fuses the disparate strands of Beck's music — folk, country, hip-hop, rock & roll, blues, jazz, easy listening, rap, pop — into one dense sonic collage. Songs frequently morph from one genre to another, seemingly unrelated genre — bursts of noise give way to country songs with hip-hop beats, easy listening melodies transform into a weird fusion of pop, jazz, and cinematic strings; it's genre-defying music that refuses to see boundaries. All of the songs on Odelay are rooted in simple forms — whether it's blues ("Devil's Haircut"), country ("Lord Only Knows," "Sissyneck"), soul ("Hotwax"), folk ("Ramshackle"), or rap ("High 5 (Rock the Catskills)," "Where It's At") — but they twist the conventions of the genre. "Where It's At" is peppered with soul, jazz, funk, and rap references, while "Novacane" slams from indie rock to funk and back to white noise. With the aid of the Dust Brothers, Beck has created a dense, endlessly intriguing album overflowing with ideas. Furthermore, it's an album that completely ignores the static, nihilistic trends of the American alternative/independent underground, creating a fluid, creative, and startlingly original work.