Primer: Beck Part 3- One Foot In The Grave

Beck sits in this weird place in the music community where he's neither as popular as whatever flavor of the month is on the radio/MTV nor as unknown as most of the bands that grace the Pitchfork frontpage everyday. So it's odd to go back to a time when Beck was just a guy with a flash-in-the-pan hit single and little else. Yet the interesting thing about Beck's early career is that he was embraced by the underground community even as he moved away from it. How else to explain his guest appearance on The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Orange or, indeed, this very album??

Stereopathetic Soulmanure and Mellow Gold are messes with wildly varying song styles. But for all their inconsistency and strangeness, One Foot In The Grave sticks out to me as the weirdest Beck album of all. Ostensibly an indie/folk/acoustic blues record, it's made even more strange by the fact that it was released on K Records and features Pacific Northwest music scenesters, a few of whom (if I remember correctly) played in Built To Spill or would do so in the future. The album also features the legendary Calvin Johnson, K Records founder, best known for his--and I don't throw around this word lightly--seminal band, Beat Happening. Even given Beck's mellow, non-party-time albums like Mutations and Sea Change, One Foot In The Grave stands out. The album has a very distinctive sound: lo-fi folk and blues, stripped down instrumentation like Beat Happening, and Beck sometimes trading off vocals with the low end drone of Calvin Johnson or the more vibrant and emotive Sam Jayne (whoever that is).

Listening to One Foot In The Grave is a treat as much for what it is as for what it's not. While I will fully admit to loving Odelay and Beck's albums that are in its similar "havin' fun" aesthetic, they don't have the capacity to surprise and delight. And I'm not saying that Beck albums have to be totally groundbreaking or totally different from what he's done before. But let's be honest: Guero and The Information, fine albums that they are, don't supply you anything truly new that you haven't heard Beck do before. But One Foot In The Grave supplies us with fascinating new slices of Beck, such as the Beck/Johnson duet 'I Get Lonesome' with its incessant acoustic guitar riff, the slow motion monotone daydream of 'See Water', the overlapping/Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat vocals on the plaintive 'Forcefield', how 'Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods' presents Beck as a bargain basement preacher/bluesman, and 'Outcome', which drafts Beck into an early-to-mid-90s indie rock slacker track, complete with a cough that's left in and a seemingly ad-libbed outro with Beck making-it-up-as-he-goes-along like Stephen Malkmus.

Even though I like One Foot In The Grave a lot, I don't think anyone could argue that it's a masterpiece. It pretty much defines the 4-stars-out-of-5 rating for me, because I consider it essential listening if you're already a fan of Beck but nothing anyone else would likely be interested in. Anyway, One Foot In The Grave is an enjoyable side street, one that you take when you're tired of going the same way home every day after work.