Beck - Odelay: Deluxe Edition

Pull down your pants and do the hot dog dance, it’s finally here!

After roughly two years in the planning, the Odelay: Deluxe Edition finally makes it out, marking Odelay’s 12th anniversary. Wilful eclecticism is a cliché these days but, back in 1996, no one did it like this. Just about ready to crest into nu metal, America offered up an increasingly repetitive alt rock, while Britain faced the arse end of Britpop; Beck stepped out a true maverick, laying hip-hop vocals on top of country guitar lines in one song, paying equal homage to heavy metal and Serge Gainsbourg in another. He also proved that he was no flash-in-the-pan following 1994’s irony-packed smash hit Loser. While most American music seemed to be borne of middle class self-pitying, Beck’s idea of “Silver foxes looking for romance/In their chainsmoke Kansas flashdance ass pants” provided a welcome alternative.

Odelay is a party record with dark edges, recorded after Beck scrapped a planned album for K Records, A Tombstone Every Mile. Apparently a close friend had recently passed away and, looking to avoid wallowing in misery, the solo acoustic record went out of the window. In its place came a hip-hop, pop, rock, funk and folk odyssey that, despite giving way to better work in the future, Beck has never really been allowed to move out from under. Eastern twangs and punk thrashings work their way in, too, amid a swathe of samples and odd keyboard passages weaved in and out by producers The Dust Brothers. This isn’t just a junk pile of ironic snippets of sound and spoken word, though. It works because the songs have real structure around which Beck and the Brothers could play.

It’s an essential album, which, even today, sounds like the most out-there record of those that tried to mix things up a little. The fact that it continues to work only marks its genius; this isn’t just mid-90s fast-paced and packaged irony for the MTV generation. Beck may have surpassed it since but, with the help of smash singles such as Where It’s At, The New Pollution and Devils Haircut [sic], Odelay made him the pin-up boy for all that was cool as the 20th Century gave way to the 21st.

Most of the stops have been pulled out for the reissue, with sleevenotes coming from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and a selection of interviews with teenagers, suggesting more about who Universal think this is aimed at than the album itself. Most of the Odelay-era B-sides are here (but, oddly, no Diskobox, originally a bonus track on the UK release, nor Odelay-era Little Drum Machine Boy from the Just Say Noel compilation), including those for Deadweight, and the Deadweight single itself, but not those which were lifted from earlier Mellow Gold-era releases. Thankfully, not every remix has been included (who needs Noel Gallagher’s Devils Haircut?), as the most dated things here are the UNKLE and Aphex Twin remixes of Where It’s At and Devils Haircut respectively. Containing the original B-sides, Disc Two is worth the purchase alone, if only for the maudlin Brother, pointing the way to Sea Change.

For the die-hards who have everything, the real seller will be the two unreleased tracks. Sadly, there’s no original demo of Debra, recorded during the same sessions but unreleased until 1999. We can only hope it’s being held for a Midnite Vultures reissue. Of the two that do feature, Gold Chains is a relatively light hip-hop excursion, closer to Guero and featuring a few neat samples. The face-burner, however, is Inferno, long achieving near-mythical status among collectors, not least because it was rumoured to feature too many samples for Universal to clear (see RC 330). In running over so much in just over six minutes, it’s practically its own EP. That recent Beck guitarist Matt Mahaffey plays on it here suggests that this isn’t the original version per se (perhaps some of the samples have been dropped and replaced with guitar lines), but it’s still a stunning piece of work that shows just what Beck is capable of.

Geffen/Universal | tbc

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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