Odelay Is the Wrong First Beck Album
This Friday, September 18, Beck releases Ride Lonesome, his first studio album since Hyperspace in 2019 and the longest gap between studio albums of his career. After two glossy pop records, he went the other way. He booked Room B at United Studios in Hollywood and called in the players from Mutations, Sea Change and Morning Phase: Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Jason Falkner. Then Nigel Godrich, who produced two of those records, mixed it.
The early reviews say the reunion worked. Jason Draper at Record Collector calls the album "a tightly framed song cycle that deals with loss, grief and eventual acceptance." MOJO calls it "a stunning display of the alchemy of turning pain into sheer beauty."
So if you only know "Loser", this is a strange week to get curious about Beck. There are at least six of him, and the one arriving Friday is the quiet one. Which should you meet first? The usual answer is Odelay, the famous one, and we think the new album shows why that advice sends people in through the wrong door. First, a map of who you might meet.
Which Beck are you?
- The collage kid (1994 to 1996). Mellow Gold, recorded mostly on a four-track at Carl Stephenson's and Rob Schnapf's houses, opens with "Loser". Odelay took the idea to the Dust Brothers, whose small studio was stacked with the records they sampled, and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. Your Beck if you want every song to sound like five records playing at once.
- The split personality (1998 to 1999). Two albums a year apart, pointing opposite ways. Mutations, cut with Godrich at Ocean Way in spring 1998, is Moog, acoustic guitars and strings, with lyrics far more somber than Odelay's. Midnite Vultures is the party: funk rock, R&B and disco, closing on "Debra", a song inspired by Prince's "Adore" and David Bowie's "Win". Your Beck if you refuse to choose between Sunday morning and Saturday night.
- The heartbreak (2002). After the Midnite Vultures tour, Beck and his fiancée, the stylist Leigh Limon, ended their nine-year relationship. He wrote most of Sea Change in a week, shelved the songs as too personal, then decided a breakup was common enough ground that recording them would not be self-indulgent. Live players instead of samples, strings arranged by his father, David Campbell. Your Beck if you have ever played one album for a month straight and never explained why.
- The collage, reloaded (2005 to 2008). Guero reunited him with the Dust Brothers. Modern Guilt, made with Danger Mouse, is 33 minutes of psychedelic rock, his shortest album, with Cat Power on two tracks. Your Beck if you like Odelay's instincts in a smaller, stranger room.
- The morning after (2014). Morning Phase was billed as a "companion piece" to Sea Change, brought back almost every musician from that record (but not Godrich), and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Your Beck if you want the sadness with a window open.
- The pop turn (2017 to 2019). Colors is Beck and Greg Kurstin playing nearly every instrument themselves, and it won two Grammys. Hyperspace, made with Pharrell Williams, leaned into synth-pop and dream pop. Your Beck if you want him bright, glossy and built around the chorus.
Why the sad one goes first
The case for Odelay is real. Spin gave it a perfect ten, Pitchfork a 9.8, and if you want to know why Beck mattered in 1996, you need it. But a first album should make you want a second one, and Odelay's thrill is the collage itself: folk, garage rock, electro, old-school rap and noise rock, all sliding past each other. You can admire every piece of it and still not know who made it.
That was the knock on Beck by the end of the 1990s. Q's review of Midnite Vultures complained that "his songs remain strangely soulless, failing to ever really grip the emotions or stir the soul."
Sea Change answers that charge. It is the record where a new listener finally meets the man who assembled all those pieces. David Fricke gave it five stars in Rolling Stone and called it "the best album Beck has ever made, and it sounds like he's paid dearly for the achievement." Godrich heard the change in the room.
That voice is the thread. Start with Sea Change and the catalog opens in both directions: back to Mutations, with the same producer and several of the same players four years earlier, at a cooler temperature; forward to Morning Phase and now Ride Lonesome. Odelay, heard after, stops being a novelty record and becomes the early work of a songwriter you already trust. Start with Odelay instead and the quiet albums risk sounding like a detour from the real Beck, when they are the closest he has come to telling you who that is.
Andy Gill wrote in The Independent that Morning Phase is "a much better album than Sea Change, just as immersive, but wiser and less indulgently wallowing." Fair on the wisdom, but the wallowing is why you start there. Gill praised the "gentle determination of the resolution", and a resolution lands harder when you have heard what it resolves.
The trilogy Ride Lonesome finishes
Here is our argument: line up Sea Change, Morning Phase and Ride Lonesome and you have a heartbreak trilogy, with Mutations as its prologue. Sea Change is the wound and Morning Phase the recovery, and on the early evidence the new one is where he makes his peace. Draper hears a song cycle about "loss, grief and eventual acceptance", its 12 songs "sympathetically textured by the trusted crew that helped make Sea Change and Morning Phase such landmark works."
He also hears "luxurious orchestral arrangements often at the fore." He singles out "For Your Love", which "channels classic Scott Walker", "Failed Words", "a prayer offered from the shadows", and the closing pair, "If You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Beyond The Light". There is also a song called "Slow Canyon", which, intended or not, echoes the vibration Godrich heard in that voice more than two decades ago.
Three singles are already out, the latest "Disappearing Act" on August 19. The tour opens this Wednesday, September 16, in Vancouver, two days before the album, and closes October 31 in Nashville.
So here is the plan. Sea Change this week, all the way through, in order. Ride Lonesome on Friday. Then work outward, in the order below.
