Beck is best known for the single “Loser”, the eccentric instrumentation on Odelay, and, to a much lesser extent, the rambling street musician who sang “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack”. Mutations is right behind Odelay as Beck’s greatest album with the eccentricity of Odelay relegated to superficial treatments over “wasted blues.” The only exception is “Diamond Bollocks”, which is taken right form the Odelay psychedelic-funk-folk-rock handbook.
Beck’s folk songs get a tropical overtone in “Tropicalia”, smoky jazz in “O Maria”, country in “Bottle of Blues” and “Canceled Check”, Syd Barrett’s madcap laughter in “Lazy Flies”, Bach’s baroque picking in “Dead Melodies”, Spanish and country guitars in “Sing It Again”, and Scott Walker’s longing in “We Live Again”.
The best songs are the melancholic melodies that string together Beck’s slightly sinuous lyricism in “Cold Brains” and “Nobody’s Fault But My Own”. The wild “genre defying” studio rat of Odelay is still here bu tis falling asleep. None of the tracks succeed because of the ancillary instrumentation but would not have been as interesting if they were typical solo acoustic folk ballads. The imagination of Odelay was so strong that the creative vapor trails were bright enough to light a whole other world on their own.
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