It’s interesting to think how he might have deployed it on the screwball Midnite Vultures – seven years later, on The Information, it makes for a moodier proposition. “We shoot our guns / we have fun,” he sings, ruefully acknowledging the friction, but admitting he can “never forget you”.Ī truly classic bassline, perhaps Beck’s best, turns this into an elastically danceable bit of boogie. Broken Drum (2005)Ī stark and startling portrait of a toxic relationship, set to trudging desert blues and a brawny two-note riff. But sat in the middle is this cheery homage to Brazilian bossa nova, shimmying around a walled garden that has filled up with heat. Mutations is a classic example of an artist swerving back into the dirt just as they have reached the open road: a bummer album of wonderfully downbeat blues after the blockbuster Odelay. Here he sets up ska-funk verses and a James Brown-style call and response for the chorus, with lyrics that suggest paint a psychedelically bougie lifestyle: “Visine at the canteen … pour champagne on a honeybee.” 20. Mixed Bizness (1999)Įven though it was Grammy-nominated for album of the year and sold more than a million copies, Midnite Vultures wasn’t quite the smash it should have been – Beck’s infectious lounge-lizard confidence is the stuff of superstars. It presages the mournful songs he would write for Sea Change and Morning Phase, but done as a simple Gillian Welch-style bluegrass ballad with guitar and harmonica, as he longs for a love with less intensity (“Putting on a lampshade ’cause you’re shining way too bright”) – and sounds guilty as hell for feeling that way. Lampshade (1994)įrom the A Western Harvest Field By Moonlight EP, another grab bag of early lint-covered oddments, Lampshade has one of Beck’s first truly indelible melodies. It’s backed with another signature of his: loose percussion, as if sourced from a junkyard. Some of Beck’s earliest songs were just him and a twanging guitar, like a delta bluesman sitting on a porch, but that twang rattles through his whole catalogue – even on much bigger productions such as this hoedown from 2006 album The Information. Powered by handclaps, its dreamy chorus heads for the clouds at a 45-degree angle – Phoenix, and the delivery of their vocalist Thomas Mars, are surely a big influence. The best song from Colors is peppily upbeat and sounds great when emanating from a sun-warmed car dashboard. The chorus then switches focus to Prince, who was such a totemic figure for the Midnite Vultures album this featured on.
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Get Real Paid (1999)īeck’s catalogue is full of fond homages – here he pops and locks to 1980s electro, sampling Kraftwerk, nodding to Adamski’s Killer, and intoning consumer fantasies in a robot voice. Rocking in Rio: Beck gets the crowd going in Brazil in 2001. Two cratediggers working together inevitably end up with a killer sample – Paul Guiot and Paul Piot’s French lounge track Amour, Vacances et Baroque underpins this yé-yé ballad, with backing vocals from Cat Power murmured deep in the mix. Walls (2008)Ī lovely two-minute jewel studded into Modern Guilt, his 2008 album with Danger Mouse. It’s a lost song that was eventually released on the deluxe 2009 reissue of One Foot in the Grave.
“Socks don’t matter / Teeth are turning green / Opinions are forming,” Beck notes drily, to a lo-fi garage rock backing. The young protagonist of this song makes the loser of Loser look like they are doing a Harvard MBA – a teenage girl “trying to experience everything at least once” with a combative stance and poor personal hygiene. There is more of this appealingly scratchy stuff on 1994’s Stereopathetic Soulmanure, a collection of noisy blurts, tracks called things such as Aphid Manure Heist, and bluegrass songs about taco-dispensing devils – a more involving listen than his major-label debut Mellow Gold. It opens with someone rambling about John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen, and so this song is Beck’s pastiche of that all-American songcraft – but the vivid character studies burn away any irony. Heartland Feeling (1993)Īs far from Colors as you can imagine, this no-fi anti-folk song is from the debut album, Golden Feelings. The production is so shiny that nothing can permeate it – much of the time, not even the listener – but there are some reasonable moments, such as the corny disco-dad moves of Up All Night. After winning album of the year at the 2015 Grammys for Morning Phase, Beck rode his rising pop cultural stock and made the poppiest record in his catalogue, Colors, which sounds a bit like Maroon 5.
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