The Best Albums of 2008 Part 1

16) Beck - Modern Guilt
While he hasn't been releasing flat out bad music, Beck's cache has been muddled in recent years by a series of merely good albums with few surprises. Though it wasn't on the same level of the return of Portishead, Modern Guilt was one of my main surprises of 2008. The album sounds fresh and new, borrowing from modern day hip hop and 60s pop/rock and producing a concise, polished album of great songs.

15) and 14) Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster.../We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
While I haven't gotten around to reviewing these yet, Los Campesinos have, with the two albums they released this year, proven themselves to be as consistent and catchy as indie pop bands twice their age. The band deftly walk the indie rock line between sincerity and irony: song titles like '...And We Roll Our Eyes In Unison' may read more like titles of bad MySpace poetry but in actuality are damn good songs crammed with ideas and hooks. Fans of Belle & Sebastian and Architecture In Helsinki need apply.

13) The Dodos - Visiter
You initial point of reference for this album will probably be Animal Collective circa Sung Tongs, but The Dodos are much less psychedelic and drone-y and much more energetic and buoyant. The songs match intricate acoustic guitar to spastic, flailing percussion that recalls all sorts of exotic African/non-Western influences. All of this is more impressive because The Dodos are only a duo yet produce full bodied music ripe with dense production.

12) Atlas Sound - Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel
While Deerhunter gave their noise/pop a restraint and polish with their album from 2008, Bradford Cox explored the electronic, ambient, and dream-pop headspaces with his 'solo' work under the Atlas Sound moniker. Let The Blind... makes for a hell of a headphones album, all glistening synthesizers, looped guitars, and longing, pained vocals. While not as immediately impressive as most of the albums on my list from this year, this one has been a return pleasure for me since its release very early in 2008.

11) Deerhoof - Offend Maggie
Deerhoof get better with time just as much as they stay good. Offend Maggie wisely adds a second guitarist to the line-up after an album with only one, bringing the band back to their 'classic' sound circa Milk Man and Runner's Four while still adding new wrinkles and twists to their now established sound. I suspect this new line-up have something even better ahead of them, but Offend Maggie is a damn good new beginning.

10) No Age - Nouns
Bands like No Age are the reason I haven't given up on music or hung myself. What I mean is, if you had asked me who No Age were at the start of 2008 I wouldn't have had a clue. Yet here I am, a few days before 2009 begins, and a band I had never heard of is on my list of best albums of 2008. This is why I love music: that endless discovery of new, great bands. That rush of new-ness coupled with excellence. Nouns is such a succinct, effortless slab of noise-pop that it's easy to underrate it in the grand scheme of things. My Bloody Valentine may never release another album or if they do it might be crap, but that's OK. Bands like No Age ensure that noise-pop will always have a future. And, err, a present.

9) Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
It's odd to revisit this music in the middle of winter because it's so quintessentially made for the warmer months, when you hear about breezes instead of wind chill factors and at the very worst you might have to wear jeans instead of shorts. Nevermind that this was one of the most hyped up and talked about releases of the first part of 2008. Nevermind all the comparisons to Afro-pop and Paul Simon's Graceland. Mind, though, how infectious and addictive this album is.

Album of the Week/Primer: Beck part 10- Modern Guilt

Counting Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot In The Grave, which some people don't, Modern Guilt marks Beck's 10th album. It's at this point in most long-running careers that the double digit milestone causes an artist to rip everything up and start again. But, since Beck has made a career out of stylistic jumps, what is he to do?? It turns out, what he does is record the most concise album of his career, and one that revitalizes his art after a few albums of standing still.

While I liked The Information, there's no denying that Modern Guilt is a superior album in every regard. It is almost half the length of The Information and bursting with new ideas and fantastic songs. There isn't a dud to be had here. Along with Radiohead's In Rainbows, a later career, ultra-tight and concise album that saw the band lightening the mood a bit, Modern Guilt hones Beck's songwriting to a fine point and marries his increasingly dark and paranoid lyrics to a bedrock combination of late 60s garage rock and modern day hip hop. Some of this new sound must come from producer Danger Mouse, who rose to prominence based on his mash-up of the Beatles's White Album (1968) and Jay Z's The Black Album (2003).

Many critics have remarked about the dark nature of the lyrics on Modern Guilt, what with its obsessions over the environment, death, age, etc. Those of us who've been paying attention to the sub-text of albums post-Sea Change have noticed this encroaching heaviness. At any rate, Modern Guilt is the most successful at tackling these themes because Beck is at the center of these songs at all times. Guero and The Information had a tendency toward burying Beck beneath a whiz-bang crust of samples, funky beats, atmospherics, and cryptic, hard-to-make-out vocals. Modern Guilt is a relatively straightforward album for Beck, by contrast, because his lyrics are generally easy to hear and understand, while the music itself is stripped down even further than The Information. Frequently making use of a 60s garage rock backing of guitar, bass, and percussion, Beck and Danger Mouse also offer drum machines, keyboards, and discrete loops/samples when necessary.

Modern Guilt's true contribution to Beck's discography is in bringing back the Beck of effortless melodies and catchy songs. Going back to Midnite Vultures and working your way forward, it quickly becomes apparent how few new ideas Beck was having. Modern Guilt is endlessly inventive, with melodies, rhythms, and hooks packed inside of each other. Even the less immediate songs like 'Chemtrails' (a slow burning, gradually building psychedelic ballad) and 'Replica' (with its glitchy electronic beats that sound more like something off an Autechre album) contain more new and great ideas than The Information, which I felt contained a few interesting new ideas, but still not enough. As usual, though, the true appeal of a Beck album is the upbeat songs, and Modern Guilt is no slouch here, with the addictive 'Gamma Ray', the incessant beat of the title track, and the ultra-distorted 'Profanity Prayers' which opens up like a flower during its chorus.

One only hopes that other long-going artists will follow the lead of Radiohead and Beck in creating half-hour-ish albums of such clarity and inventiveness. Only time will tell if Modern Guilt spells a rebirth, a renaissance, for Beck's art. Whatever the case may turn out to be, we're left with one of the most pleasing and immediately enjoyable albums in his discography.

Primer: Beck Part 9- The Information

Between the release of Guero (and its remix sibling Guerolito) and the release of The Information Beck did an interview with Wired magazine talking about the future of the album as a format. Though The Information was released with some of these ideas--the blank cover to be "designed" by the listener, the full set of silly on-the-cheap videos that came with the initial batch of discs or could be easily accessed on video sites--it was only with the Deluxe Edition, released last year, that the album truly felt "complete" to Beck's vision.

This edition of the album comes with all 4 possible sticker sets one could have gotten with the original release, as well as a disc collecting the remixes done for the album, as well as a handful of b-sides/outtakes. Beck's new concept for the album was thus set: it would be up to listener how he or she experienced the album. They could make their own version of it between the combination of "official" tracks, the b-sides/outtakes, and the remixes. They could watch the videos. They could make their own cover and liner artwork. The concept seemed to be that an artist would create an unfinished package of music and artwork and would leave it up to the listener (and other artists, judging by the remixes) to "finish" the album.

On paper and theoretically, this sounds intelligent and forward thinking. In practice, it's either lazy or pretentious. You see, people have been making their own versions of albums for years. It's a famous thought experiment/argument starter to have people create a one-CD version of the Beatles' White Album, and as soon as people could record albums to their own cassette tapes they were cherry picking their favorite songs. As for the "create your own artwork!!" thing it's a gimmick; admittedly a kind of neat one, because anytime you give the public the tools to make something they'll turn out things you never thought of...but it's still a gimmick. The biggest problem I have with the concept is that I'm not a musician or a producer. I want artists to finish their album and present me with a completed work rather than trying to bring me into their process, however skeletally. You really want me to help you make an album, give me full access to your master tapes, let me help edit/write your lyrics, allow me to choose between different professionally rendered covers, etc.

I've gone three paragraphs without even getting to the music yet, which is exactly why I want to begin the meat of my review by saying that The Information is Beck's most misunderstood and complicated album. Misunderstood because it's neither another Odelay-also ran like Guero nor is it a return to the somber Sea Change, which was produced by Nigel Godrich (who, I'll awkwardly note, is the producer of this album as well). Rather, The Information is something like a step in a new direction for Beck even though it doesn't sound radically different. And The Information is Beck's most complicated album for two reasons: all of the above paragraphs of album deep thoughts and the fact that it is derived from multiple sessions over the years, dating from the end of Sea Change to concurrent with Guero and possibly beyond. If you take Beck's word for it, The Information was recorded, off and on, from late 2003 to early 2006. Somewhere in there, he got with the Dust Brothers and recorded Guero.

Ironically, then, The Information is more cohesive and consistent than Guero. Part of this credit must, one supposes, go to Nigel Godrich, who has a history of helping bands get simultaneously more experimental but also tighter at the same time (at least, that's how I see it). Anyway, The Information is a deceptive album because all the press surrounding it would have you believe it's either another party-time Odelay sequel or a mixture of Guero and Sea Change because of its lyrical darkness and equal measure of party and mellow songs. However, The Information represents for Beck a step in some new directions because of its (relative) minimalism and lack of samples. Doing a side-by-side comparison of Guero and The Information, almost all of the songs on the latter lack samples and have significantly less sound elements going at a time. Witness 'Motorcade', which is a minimalist electronic piece that has the same twinkling piano feel as Radiohead's 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box.' Witness 'Cellphone's Dead', which is built on a melody borrowed from Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' and therefore isn't built on an explicit sample of another song, unlike Guero's 'E-Pro.' Not that Beck has to produce all live instrumentation to be good, of course, but The Information is truly cohesive where Guero failed because it borrows ideas and influences instead of directly lifting them. For those keeping score at home, this is also why Mutations and Midnite Vultures were so successful: Beck is better at making new things of borrowed ideas than he is at making new things from directly copied ideas. Hell, I liked 'E-Pro', but mostly because I like the riff from 'So What'Cha Want' by the Beastie Boys. To put it further, 'Cellphone's Dead' and Odelay borrow ideas but don't use them in total to make a song. 'E-Pro' is almost all about that stolen riff.

Moreso than anything else, you really get the feeling that the details of The Information were sweated upon and fretted over even if Beck ended up throwing the whole thing to the public in a muddled mess of "it's the future, today!! Make your own version!!" conceits. Since the album took--or so we're told--almost three years to finish, the songs have a careful attention to melodies, sounds, and rhythm that often felt arbitrary or lacking on Guero. At the same time, The Information has a kind of stoned flow to it. Watching the video version of the album today, I got the sense that the arbitrary, silliness of the costumes and actions were done under the influence of something. Notably, the album's middle is mellow, psychedelic, and slow. After the superb strut of 'Nausea' we get the one-two-three combo of 'Dark Star', 'Movie Theme' (as close to dream-pop as Beck will ever get), and 'We Dance Alone', the latter of which unites hip hop and musique concrete psychedelia. As for new directions for Beck, there's the glitchy stop-start rap rant '1000 BPM', which most people seem to hate but I think is brilliant, and the way 'Strange Apparition' starts off kind of generically before morphing into a slower, chunkier beast halfway through. Thankfully there's plenty of Beck's gift for melody to hold our hand, in particular the underappreciated 'New Round', which has a Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat vocal circular at various points in the song. And the finale, 'The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton' is easily the most lucid and bizarre of Beck's career despite a history of ending albums with hidden bonus tracks that shouldn't exist because they throw caution to the wind and frequently don't fit the tone of the album proper.

I don't meant to get people too excited about this album. It's not exactly a career renaissance, but it's better than both Sea Change and Guero. Even with the addition of the extras this deluxe edition brings, it's still no masterpiece. The bonus three songs that, if put on the album would have made it more party-like and too similar to Guero, are not better than what was on the "official" tracklisting, while the remix disc is entirely dependent on how much you like remixes and electronic music. I actually don't know what the point of Beck remixes are, since you'll only like them if you expressly like those artists contributing them OR you just want a longer, dancier version of songs that are already danceable. Even David Sitek's remix of a non-danceable track (namely 'Dark Star') only works if you like his production work and/or his band TV on the Radio.

The Information, in its Deluxe Edition, is a fascinating point of discussion for music critics even though, as I said, I feel like it was a miscalculation (Beck seems to have felt the same way, since his new album, Modern Guilt, is an old fashioned, lean-and-mean 35ish minutes of music with a definite cover and tracklisting). If you aren't a hardcore fan (who will want the Deluxe Edition, because, well, they want everything related to Beck), you'd be just fine getting the normal CD version or even stripping all the artifice away and grabbing the music directly off iTunes or the digital music store of your choice.

When all is said and done, we must come down to the point of whether or not all the extra ideas and concepts tied to The Information made it better. Well, just listening to the "project" as a piece of music, they didn't. All the best songs made the "official" tracklisting, in a great sequence, and the extra bits (remixes and videos) are totally inessential. As I just got done saying, you may actually be better off just downloading this off iTunes so you can appreciate the album for what it is as music instead of a new concept for the album as an ongoing "project" that fans participate in. It's not that I hate the idea of an artist putting more, or even some, control of their music in the hands of listeners. It's just that this was a misguided attempt and something that people have been able to do for years. Furthermore, all this extra baggage distracts from the album itself. Which is a solid Beck album, when all is said and done, and one that corrected most of the problems I had with Guero.

Primer: Beck Part 8- Guero

You could be forgiven for calling Guero a "return to form." This is exactly the sort of thing reviewers usually mean when they play this card: an artist/band returning to what made him/her/them so beloved in the first place. Problematically, Beck is beloved not just for Odelay, so calling this album "a return to form" is technically incorrect. It's a return to the Odelay sound, and while I do like the album, something has always escaped me. Something I can't put my finger on; some intangible quality that means I don't enjoy the album nearly as much as I might have. Something that goes beyond "it's a slightly different and ultimately weaker retread of Odelay."

It's dangerous for an artist to take inspiration from him or herself. 'Dangerous' being a relative word, allow me to explain. Not dangerous in the sense of a bomb or gun being dangerous, or a serial killer on the loose being dangerous; dangerous in the sense that it rarely works out and makes the artist seem narcissistic. It's acceptable for people to take inspiration from others--after all, Guero's opener 'E-Pro' is based on a sample of the Beastie Boys--but it seems egotistical to take inspiration from your own work. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, though. Guero wasn't inspired by Odelay. Moreso I get the feeling that Beck, after a couple albums of exploring his whims and various, unique aesthetic directions, felt he had nowhere else to go. So, why not return to your roots?? If anyone could record a newer, better Odelay, Beck would be the safest bet.

The Beck of 2005 is not the Beck of 1996, for better or worse. A decade of other projects, of incredibly varying character and sonic direction, show influences on Beck's modern-day-Odelay. I don't want to imply that Guero needed to be all new ideas for it to succeed; if anyone had the right to record a "consolidating all the strengths of my last few releases" album, it was Beck. Unfortunately the combination of the sounds of Mutations, Midnite Vultures, and Sea Change doesn't quite match up to the free wheeling levity of Odelay. Guero is a darker and weightier album that sinks beneath the waves as much as it manages to float above them.

Guero gets off to a great start with the two-hit combo of 'E-Pro' and 'Que Onda Guero', both songs that tip their hat back to the incredibly fun sample-fests of Odelay. Things quickly detour with 'Girl', one of the most surprisingly stripped down and catchy pop songs of Beck's career. This is really more of a full band pop/rock song driven by guitars than it is a loop and sample heavy Odelay-ish track. 'Missing' harkens back to both Sea Change and Mutations, the former for its depressed lyrics and string saturated atmosphere, the latter for its Brazilian/Tropicalia-style percussion. 'Black Tambourine' is a slight, mid-tempo bass fest that makes little impression. Stripped of a few elements, 'Earthquake Weather' could have fit neatly on Sea Change, with its ponderous flow and "these days I barely get by"-slow motion chorus. 'Hell Yes' attempts to restart the album with a Midnite Vultures-esque funk/rap shot-in-the-arm before 'Broken Drum', the album's worst track, quickly kills the momentum. This song, with no changes at all, could have fit unto the end of Sea Change, and no one would have batted an eye. Look, Odelay had some sad and searching songs, too, but they were inventive and interesting. 'Broken Drum' drags and drags and doesn't give the listener enough to latch unto. 'Scarecrow' is fun and catchy if unremarkable, while 'Go It Alone' is the most strikingly new idea on the whole album, with its addictive groove (partially courtesy of Jack White on bass) and percussion-heavy sound.

With the album's last stretch I realize why I don't like Guero as much as I might. I said earlier that Guero is a slightly different and ultimately weaker retread of Odelay, and it is. But in bringing up the "taking inspiration from himself" idea, I think this issue with the album comes to a head on this last stretch. The main difference between the two albums is that Odelay is much more fun and much sillier than Guero. You never really know what Odelay will throw at you next, whereas Guero is pretty tame in comparison, and also manages to remake Odelay into a methodical, almost death obsessed album. The pallor of Sea Change hasn't quite left Beck's system and it infects Guero for the worse even when he tries to fashion it into new forms, like the chain-gang blues of 'Farewell Ride.' Return to Guero after hearing Odelay again, and it's shocking how reserved and introverted Guero really is in comparison. Especially once you get past the obvious funmakers of 'E-Pro', 'Que Onda Guero', and 'Hell Yes.'

Ultimately, I'm continually surprised at how little Guero holds up to my memory. I always go into it remembering it as a newer Odelay, but by the time its over, I'm left with the impression that it's an inferior follow-up to Odelay with incongruous lyrical themes and musical content. Guero's reputation is largely built on less than half of its contents, and though I don't think it's a complete waste, it's also not exceptional. Guero represents the first time Beck began to repeat himself, and though this is not automatically damning, I certainly feel like he could have done better.

Primer: Beck Part 7- Sea Change

When you're going through a depression, it's hard to create anything. The few things you do manage to finish seem awful and needlessly miserable, as if the ideas are there but the energy and life are missing. You don't feel like being around anyone, and while they would never tell you this, nobody feels like being around you. Depressed people aren't fun. So one could be forgiven for thinking that Sea Change is a mediocre album because it's not very fun to listen to a guy whisper and whine about his ex and how sad the world seems. The critical re-evaluation goes something like, the album captures being depressed so well that it is, in itself, like a miserable person who isn't fun to be around.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. I have wrestled with Sea Change since its release, at first thinking it was brilliant, then boring, then awful, then merely good, then brilliant again. I wish that I could attribute my changing opinion of the album to my own changing relationship and emotional statuses, but I think it's more a matter of my being more or less forgiving of flaws. Anyway, let's be serious: Rolling Stone gave this album 5 stars and called it Beck's best album. That's enough to raise anyone's alarm.

The reason I don't like Sea Change is that it's just not that good. Not completely bad, but not that good. It begins with the overstuffed, suffocating production (this is the only time I think Nigel Godrich made an album worse instead of better) and ends with the scattershot songwriting quality. The album begins and ends well with the pristine melancholia of 'The Golden Age' and the stripped down, acoustic 'Side of the Road', but in between the songs are a very mixed bag. The strings on 'Paper Tiger' add nothing to the song and are mixed way too high. Similarly, the overblown and bloated 'Lonesome Tears' has schmaltzy strings and feels like it goes on for twice as long as it does. 'Lost Cause' is really good, with its fingerpicking guitar and Beck's voice right up front and all the ancillary swirls of sound and synthesized touches relegated to the background. Similarly, the added elements to the re-recorded 'It's All In Your Mind' (released a few years earlier as a stripped down single) emphasize the emotional impact of the song. The album's most surprising and successful moment of depression and stuffed production comes in 'Round The Bend', a freefloating string-led dirge. Unfortunately, 'Little One' piles on instruments during the choruses, going for the obvious when it should, I dunno, try something else. I genuinely like the parts of this song that don't go the easy route, though it's here that I want to make mention of the fact that I think this album is one of Beck's poorest as a vocalist. As we've established, this is his sad sack album, but his delivery of lyrics is often mumbled, muffled, or just generally drained of any creativity or emotion. Nick Drake and Elliott Smith recorded a lot of sad albums, too, but their vocals were often the biggest draw.

I would almost wager that, as time goes on and people reevaluate Beck's discography, Sea Change will be understood as the mediocre and overproduced album that it is. Blood on the Tracks, an album of bummed out, post-breakup catharsis (whether you believe it was personal or not), was highly praised on release, and reevaluations of Bob Dylan's music have kept it toward the top of the pile. I don't see this happening with Sea Change. My opinion has varied wildly about it over the years, but now it's settled, hourglass-style, into a half empty/half full glass.

Primer: Beck Part 6- Midnite Vultures

There are certain albums that I'm embarrassed to play, not because I don't think I should like them but because other people will get the wrong idea about me. It's all well and good to say that what you like doesn't determine what you are like, but it has to have some bearing on your personality, doesn't it?? I like Midnite Vultures but I don't like it as an ironic wink-and-an-eyebrow-raise to sexy music. I like it because, somewhere deep inside of all of us, there's a sexy freak waiting to bump and grind in dance clubs and take off his or her clothes while purring dirty things to strangers.

So, yeah, Midnite Vultures is embarrassing to play with other people in your car or the same room. I suspect it could go either way with a girlfriend, though it never occurred to me to see when I had them. This album is embarrassing because, even in today's increasingly more open social atmosphere, sexuality is still a very private thing. It's something you mostly do alone, or with one other person (maybe more than one, if you frequently attend orgires or one of those guys I see in male/female/female threesome videos). In the same way that you can be totally absorbed in a romantic scene in a movie and have it ruined when someone else walks into the room, Midnite Vultures seems overblown and ridiculous when someone who isn't feeling it happens by and gives you a critical glare.

But let's push aside the naysayers and put on some cologne (or perfume) and our sexiest silk boxers (panties), because when you are ready to get down--whether this means dancing or knocking boots...well, I'll leave that to you--then Midnite Vultures will be ready for you. The album can be lazily summarized as Beck's exercise in funk, R&B, electronic music (mostly 'Get Real Paid'), and soul. However, the result is less pastiche and more his unique take and reconstruction than anything else. The closest the album comes to obvious-ness is 'Debra', an over the top slow jam about wanting to get with a girl named Jenny and her sister, who he thinks is named Debra. Purportedly, on tours during this era, a bed was lowered from the ceiling for this song. Classy.

Midnite Vultures quickly makes its intentions known with the opener 'Sexx Laws', in which Beck confesses/brags that he's a full grown man who's not afraid to cry, but that he also wants to defy the logic of all sex laws. Metaphorically speaking. Er, wait, no, literally speaking. 'Sexx Laws' is the perfect way to kick off the record because while it seems obvious and easy on first listen, it soon reveals interesting touches, like the banjo during the outro. 'Nicotine & Gravy', despite having an booty shaking groove, also manages to rhyme 'Israeli' with 'lazy' and 'gravy. 'Get Real Paid' recalls both Daft Punk and Kraftwerk, only, you know, sexy. Sexier?? Ah well. Any song with a roboticized Beck pleading with you "touch my a$$ if you're qualified" is a good one. 'Hollywood Freaks' brings in a shot or two of hip hop to keep the party bouncing, while 'Beautiful Way' is a soulful late-album ballad with Beth Orton dueting in her sultry way.

All told, Midnite Vultures is an almost masterpiece, and an interesting left turn from an artist who's entire career seemed to be built on odd left turns. If Midnite Vultures doesn't quite stand up to repeated listens like Odelay and Mutations do, well, it's not supposed to. This is an album you throw on when you're in the mood, or trying to get someone else in the mood. This also happens to be the last wholly party-centric Beck album; later Odelay-sequels Guero and The Information add noticeable shades of darkness and sobriety. But we'll get to that later. For now, pour another drink, loosen your tie, and have fun.

Primer: Beck Part 5- Mutations

Mutations was one of the very first CDs I ever bought. It's kind of surreal to be sitting here, a decade later, writing a review of it. I've listened to the album so often that I have almost ceased to hear it anymore; it's become part of my DNA. Mutations, along with Radiohead's OK Computer, was the album that led me to fall in love with music and the idea of an album as a unified work of art instead of just a collection of songs. Returning to the album after a decade of enjoyment, its richness and appeal are sharper than ever.

It may or may not be telling that Beck wanted to release this album exclusively on Bong Load Custom Records. When signing his record deal with Geffen, Beck stipulated that should he choose to, he would be allowed to release albums on indie labels and Geffen couldn't do anything about it. They seemed to feel differently, and Beck sued the label for releasing Mutations against his wishes, and all manner of lawsuits between Beck, Bong Load Custom, and Geffen were filed. I assume it was settled out of court because I've never been able to find more information on the matter. At any rate, does Beck's desire to release Mutations on an indie label show that he didn't have much faith in the album, or was it for a different reason??

My assumption is that Beck felt he could continue as he had before his success with the 'Loser' single, not to mention the Odelay album. Remember that he had released two albums on indie labels before, one of which was the blues/folk/indie One Foot In The Grave. It seems to me that his plan was to release a big, mainstream appealing fun record, like Odelay and Mellow Gold had been, and then supplement with albums on indie labels as his whimsy carried him. To be sure, Mutations has more in common with the hardcore-fans-only One Foot In The Grave, but sales and reviews both proved that even on a major label Mutations was brilliant, earning Beck a Grammy for 'Best Alternative Music Peformance.'

The sound of Mutations is radically different from Odelay, but at the same time it's removed from its closest sibling One Foot In The Grave. Where that album stuck to a mostly acoustic blues/folk sound, with some indie rock bits thrown in for good measure, Mutations embraces a full band singer/songwriter canvas and paints it with colors and techniques borrowed from country, blues, folk, bossa nova, tropicalia, psychedelia, and classic late 60s/early 70s pop/rock. With Radiohead uber-producer Nigel Godrich in tow, the whole thing has a clean sheen that nevertheless doesn't get in the way of the more rustic and spontaneous feel on hand. That is to say, when keyboards and odd sound burbles appear, they drift in naturally. At any rate, gone are the genre mash-ups and sample-heavy sound of Odelay. It must have come as a shock to people who were only familiar with 'Loser' and Odelay.

Most shocking of all, however, is just how good Mutations is. While I have always liked this album, now I fully notice just how texturally and melodically rich it is. The production is full and thick, but never suffocatingly dense; every instrument and sound has a space all its own to demonstrate its purpose. Nothing is arbitrarily slapped on: I suspect even the casual studio chatter opening of 'Sing It Again' was planned. Even so, the songs are the true stars here, from the honky tonk, piano-and-harmonica goodness of 'Canceled Check' to the mournful 'Dead Melodies' with its delicate acoustic guitar fingerpicking to the drunken waltz of 'Sing It Again' to the staggering, reeling fun of 'Bottle of Blues', which has Beck seemingly making it up as he goes along. Even the odd man out, the, uhh...tropical 'Tropicalia' somehow fits, with its strange cuica sounds and chilled out, almost-Muzak horn section. On a side note, this is the song that I heard on a TV commercial for the album which made me want to buy it.

I want to make a quick mention of the lyrics for this album because I think they're the finest in Beck's career. Before this point, his lyrics ranged from the fairly-straightforward to absurdist word jumbles that sound cool. With Mutations his songwriting took a more lucid and poetic turn, with lyrics of true depth that aren't immediately obvious but also aren't inscrutable nonsense. It's not that Beck's lyrics were necessarily bad before Mutations, or that they would be afterward, but this is definitely his best album in terms of the words alone.

The lasting impression about Mutations is that it was just something Beck made for the fun of it. Reportedly it only took two weeks to record, with Beck working on one song per day until it was completed. Fa

Primer Part 4/Album of the Week: Beck- Odelay

We wouldn't have the full story until later, but you've got to hand it to Beck for making an album like Odelay no matter how much or how little you know about his history. After having a hit single with 'Loser' and being labeled a new voice for his "slacker" generation, nobody should have expected that he had a masterpiece on the way. Mellow Gold can be seen as something of a not-nearly-as-good template for Odelay, but its contemporary Beck releases--Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot In The Grave--certainly didn't point to something like Odelay. The former was an indulgent mess that was itself not-nearly-as-good as Mellow Gold, while the latter was a solid, unique folk-blues affair with an indie rock label and its legendary head.

Strangely, then, the follow-up to Mellow Gold nearly was fashioned more in line with the One Foot in the Grave style than the genre bending, upbeat, party-time bottlerocket that it ended up being. Following his success with 'Loser' and the Mellow Gold album, a few people who were close to Beck died, including his grandfather, Al Hansen, who had a great influence on Beck's life. So Beck began to record sparse, sad songs with Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, best known for going on to work with Elliott Smith. Some of these songs would appear on Odelay--I'm guessing 'Jack-Ass' and 'Ramshackle'--while others would see the light of day on Sea Change, 'It's All In Your Mind' for sure. As a testament to Beck's character, at some point he scrapped this project and ended up working with the Dust Brothers on something completely different. Often you reach a point while depressed due to the loss of loved ones where you look at yourself in the mirror and say "I can either start trying to feel better, or I can just wallow in misery forever." The music world should be forever grateful that Beck chose to start feeling better, because Odelay is his hands-down best album ever, magnum opus, critical darling, and whatever other nice things I can say about it.

The easiest way to describe Odelay is that it takes all the best ideas from Mellow Gold, makes them better, and crafts an entire album out of them. Songs 'Beercan', 'Loser', 'F***in With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)', 'Steal My Body Home', and 'Blackhole' all have clear descendants on Odelay, although the scope and depth of imagination and songwriting skill is leaps and bounds beyond what had come before. 'Hotwax' blends slick blues, hip hop, and rock into something entirely new. The jazzy 'New Pollution' features an incessant drumbeat, funky keyboards, and saxophones sailing across the smoky nightclub feel. 'Derelict' is an intense psychedelic funeral built on a foundation of Indian music. 'Where It's At' is the highest of the album's high points, a now classic single that wrangles old school soul and hip hop in exciting new ways, with a wink and series of handclaps that become irresistable by their second appearance. 'Minus' presents Beck's first successful attempt at thrashing punk rock, with a bracing fuzz bass line and a noisy ending that expertly gives way to the country pastiche 'Sissyneck.' Odelay is that rare thing: an album over 50 minutes in length without a wasted moment, and one that keeps surprising and delighting throughout its 13 tracks.

This year, Odelay was re-released in a deluxe edition. Though it's nice to have the hard-to-find or completely unreleased material, I have to say that this deluxe edition is a let down. After vault clearing re-issues of both high content and high quality like those for the Pavement albums, or even other albums done by the same company as Odelay for, say, Sonic Youth's Goo, this feels like a lost opportunity. Eve though it would only interest critics and hardcore fans, why not include alternate mixes, demos, or even the tracks laid down prior to scrapping the somber album?? After all, no casual fan is likely to buy this anyway. In its defense, though, the deluxe edition does contain some gems, such as the soundtrack-only 'Deadweight', 'Richard's Hairpiece' (which is Aphex Twin's remix of 'Devil's Haircut', and every bit as awesome as that suggests), a better full-band version of 'Thunder Peel' from Stereopathetic Soulmanure, 'Brother' and 'Feather In Your Cap' from that somber pre-Odelay session, 'Devil Got My Woman' which is a cover that would be more at home on a One Foot in the Grave reissue, and 'Burro', which is a mariachi version of 'Jack-Ass.' In Spanish. So while the deluxe edition does have some interesting material, it's otherwise mostly crap--everything either sounds like incredibly inferior Odelay-era songs that were rightfully left off the album or messy sketches that don't go anywhere beyond an interesting drumbeat or sample. Finally there's the UNKLE remix of 'Where It's At', which is as overlong and inconsistent as its 12 minute runtime would lead you to believe. So, like an UNKLE album, then. Anyway, the deluxe edition is not what I would consider essential, so those waffling between the two should stick with the original.

Beck's previous releases were interesting and succeeded as albums to varying degrees, but it was with Odelay that he completely proved himself. Sitting here 12 years after its release, it's equally impressive for how much he's accomplished since and how different his next three albums would be. But I digress. Odelay is a startling album, one that is all over the map musically but hangs together indelibly as a whole. It's an album that I have no reservations about calling 'essential listening' because it's exactly the kind of exciting out-of-the-blue landmark release that gets music critics out of bed in the morning for.

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.

Primer: Beck Part 2- Mellow Gold

Mellow Gold is one of those albums that is only known for its hit single. Certainly it didn't get bad reviews on its release, but it doesn't have the critical standing that Odelay has. As with Radiohead's Pablo Honey, I pretty much just listened to the hit single and skipped around the album and quickly went back to the other, better albums. I've never had a good handle on Mellow Gold. I don't listen to it anymore and it's been awhile since I've heard it, so my enduring impression has always been that it's an inferior version of what he would do with Odelay. But listening to Mellow Gold now, 7 or so years after I first heard it, and knowing where Beck's career has gone, it's suddenly all cleared up in my head: it's his transitional album.

It bears repeating that Beck released three albums in 1994, although most of us only knew about Mellow Gold at that point. Whereas Stereopathetic Soulmanure probably predated the other two albums, Mellow Gold and One Foot in the Grave were recorded during the same span of time, though not at the same time. While Stereopathetic was a pretty awful, messy album that tried a lot of things and only had a few good songs, One Foot and Mellow Gold succeed, to different degrees, because the former tries a unifying style throughout while the latter is--well--a messy album that tries a lot of things...except that, unlike Stereopathetic, it has more good songs than bad.

In fact, a lot of the songs on Mellow Gold could easily fit unto Stereopathetic Soulmanure. The main difference between the two albums (other than the higher recording fidelity and songwriting quality) is that Mellow Gold has a healthy tinge of hip hop. Sometimes the difference between a sort-of-catchy song and a generational touchstone is a fantastic-but-obscure sample and a drum loop, as 'Loser' prove to us all. But elsewhere on Mellow Gold the best tracks are the ones that play similarly free with style and genre. 'F***in With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)' mixes a bluesy, harmonica-led twang with a grooving drum beat and Beck's free flowing lyric surrealism. 'Beercan', the album's secret masterpiece, points the hardest to his future, with a deliriously fun, sample laden style and an insanely fun chorus with Beck's soon-to-be-standard vocal asides and silliness. Meanwhile, 'Steal My Body Home' and album closer 'Blackhole' hint toward the mellow, darker side of Beck as seen on albums like Sea Change, not to mention the Eastern tinge of songs like 'Derelict.'

The weakness of Mellow Gold comes in the more standard, singer/songwritery stuff or the experimental dreck that weighed down Stereopathetic Soulmanure. 'Pay No Mind (Snoozer)' is, like the better songs off of Stereopathetic such as 'Satan Gave Me a Taco', funny and fun for the first few listens but quickly becomes tiresome. 'Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997' is a plodding attempt at gravity that feels twice as long as it is and completely sucks the momentum out of the album. Then there's the crap like 'Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)' and 'Sweet Sunshine', which harken back to--again--Stereopathetic Soulmanure but for all the wrong reasons. Lest I forget 'Mutherf****er', a two minute patience test of painful noise rock and profanity that is not even good enough to be on Stereopathetic let alone Mellow Gold. I am far from adverse to painful noise rock and/or profanity, but I think even Beck would agree that this song is a piece of crap and a waste of time and space.

While I do like Mellow Gold more than I used to, I'm still not in love with it. Ultimately it is a step up from Stereopathetic Soulmanure, but it's still on the same floor of the stairwell, as it were. Mellow Gold is a good listen, but it's not as completely great as his other albums; other than an awesome hit single, a couple great songs that point the way to something great, and a bunch of mediocre-to-awful other tracks, Mellow Gold is nothing more or less than a transitional album which fans will appreciate but one that will leave newbies wanting.

Primer: Beck Part 1- Stereopathetic Soulmanure

Everyone has that one album or artist that really got them into music. Certainly even as kids we liked music, but it was an indiscriminate and child-ish form of liking something. But then--sometime in our adolescence--there's an experience we have where we realize there's more to this whole "music" thing than just thinking a song or music video is neat. For me, it was Beck, and the song was 'Tropicalia' from a TV commercial around the time of the release of Mutations. I had liked music before, sure; I even had bought a few CDs. But I had never heard anything like 'Tropicalia' before, and when I got the CD I figured out it was the guy who did that funny 'Loser' song years earlier, and so on. But my appreciation for Beck went much deeper than a simple "hey, I like this song, I should get the CD so I can listen to it." No, Beck was the first person I saw as an artist and not just a 'musician', and who's every album I had to have.

So I got them all, and learned the lesson that sometimes even your favorite artists can, have, and will release something that you don't like. Even back when I first heard Stereopathetic Soulmanure, I knew it was crap. As a young man my critical faculties weren't as--ahem--advanced as they are now, so something was either 'awesome' or 'stupid.' Well, Stereopathetic was stupid, and remains so. It was only a year or so ago that I revisited this album, wondering if my juvenile self had gone through a violent reaction. After all, it's always hard when your hero lets you down and produces something less than perfect...maybe I was brash and cast it down for being less than pefect. After all, if there's one thing Americans are good at it's tearing down a hero as easily as we build them up. But....no, Stereopathetic is, more or less, as underwhelming as I remember.

Though only released a week or so before Mellow Gold, the music that makes up Stereopathetic Soulmanure largely predates that album, the breakout 'Loser' single, and the contemporaneous One Foot In The Grave album. Actually, I've always been a bit confused as to the chronology of just when all this stuff was recorded, though ultimately it doesn't matter because 99% of the population didn't know anything about Stereopathetic or One Foot and only hardcore fans are likely to care even today, when Beck is a pseudo-celebrity. But I digress. Anyone coming to this album is going to come to it after having heard any of his other albums, just as I did. In fact, I didn't even know this album existed until I saw it circa 1998 at the store and wondered if it was a bootleg or a secret new album.

I may as well come out and say that Stereopathetic Soulmanure is unequivocally Beck's worst album, and even for an artist known for wild stylistic jumps and genre bending conceits, it's horribly disjointed and amateurishly indulgent. While one can forgive this kind of thing in an odds-and-ends compilation from an artist who has established his or her greatness, Stereopathetic is, unfortunately, the opposite case: an odds-and-ends slab from an artist who had yet to prove himself. Among its 25 (or 26, depending on the pressing you get) tracks and over an hour runtime, you get decent folk ('Rowboat', 'Puttin It Down'), silly nonsense ('Ozzy', the weird alien voice spokenword pieces), silly-but-kind-of-good songs ('Cut 1/2 Blues', 'Satan Gave Me a Taco'), god awful noise and noise rock ('Pink Noise', the interludes between some songs, 'Rollins Power Sauce', the hidden bonus track), bluesy hobo busking field recordings ('Waitin' For A Train', 'No Money No Honey', 'Aphid Manure Heist'), and, err, an accordion instrumental ('Jagermeister Pie').

And that's the main crux of it: a long winded mess of an album that doesn't cohere enough to really be called an album but isn't a compilation, either. To be fair, there is something undeniably charming in listening to this album, knowing Beck like we do now. One must also keep in mind that, at the time, it wasn't played out to write a song about Ozzy Osbourne or to pose for the liner art in front of an ice cream truck playing a banjo and wearing a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet. This kind of absurdism, irony, and self-aware-winking-to-the-audience was relatively fresh. However, the main interest that anyone is likely to have in the album is as time capsule from a time before Beck Hansen was Beck The Rock Star.

I have to admit that in re-revisiting the album, my feelings have swayed back and forth between summing it up as "my least favorite Beck album, but not a bad album necessarily" and "a bad album who's sins I can forgive because I love Beck." But aren't those the same thing?? In the end, once you giggle at a few of the songs and extract the few decent ones for mixtapes or whatever, there simply isn't anything here you'll want to come back to. If this was from any other artist I would think it was a big joke on the listener; if I had heard this before any of Beck's other albums, I would have no reason to believe he was worth any more of my time.

Primer: Pavement Part 6- Terror Twilight

The final albums by bands often have a fascinating quality about them that has nothing to do with the music contained inside. It's tempting to throw the lyrics across a table like owl bones and try to read coded messages about a break-up or inter-band acrimony. At the same time, it's also tempting to compare the final album to the subsequent solo material and/or side projects of the former band members. Would the band have naturally headed in those directions, or did it take the end of the band and a "clean slate" mindset to create those changes??

Terror Twilight has a reputation that has nothing to do with the music. Fans see in the lyrics from 'Ann Don't Cry' Stephen Malkmus's farewell to the band--"I am not having fun anymore"--while a literal farewell was in the alternate title for the album (according to The Slow Century DVD, a working title was Farewell Horizontal). However, I've never bought the assertion I see sometimes that this is a proto-Malkmus solo album. Though all the songs are written by Malkmus, there is still that distinct Pavement-ness to the album; in fact, despite the production of Nigel Godrich, it's actually more unhinged and off-the-cuff than Brighten The Corners.

Coming at the end of the 90s and the end of the band's lifetime, Terror Twilight is their secret masterpiece. I would wager that as time has gone on, and continues to go on, more and more people will come around to it. As it's the band's last album, it's had too much stigma attached to it for people to peel back those surface layers and get to the meat beneath. That is to say, it's the band's most overtly psychedelic and 60s inspired album. For the video for 'Shady Lane', Malkmus's vision for director Spike Jonze was to create something that was "psychedelic but not retro." That vision, it seems to me, was carried over to the Terror Twilight album.

In many ways, too, Terror Twilight is like a mini-Wowee Zowee in terms of its variety. The MOR pop ballad 'Major Leagues'--which I initially hated and have only recently come around to, thanks to its sublime "they'll wear you down sometime" bit--butts up against the dense, three-part, bluesy (no pun intended) 'Platform Blues', with harmonica soloing from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Elsewhere, the cool, groovy 'Speak, See, Remember' (the one song that even people who don't seem to like Terror Twilight will admit is awesome) gives way to the the intense guitar meltdown 'The Hexx' (the first of many Malkmus long jams that either end or help bring an album to a close), which then gives way to the impossibly catchy 'Carrot Rope', complete with overlapping sing-along vocals.

Pavement's album covers, lyrics, and music have always been odd and sitting outside the mainstream, but Terror Twilight pushes the whole thing into 'psychedelic.' For instance, 'Spit On A Stranger' is about kissing another person for the first time, though you would really have to think about it to understand that. With these skewed lyrical nuggets comes a more overtly psychedelic/60s inspired sound. Though some of this credit must be given to producer Nigel Godrich, who had Radiohead's OK Computer from 1997 and Beck's Mutations from 1998 under his belt (two albums that have similar psychedelic/60s leanings), Malkmus must take the main brunt of the credit/blame for this album. Guitar effects pedals and mostly-subtle squiggling and burbling keyboards are used prominently alongside clean guitars with slight reverb. At the same time, some of the songs are Malkmus's most ambitious, like the aforementioned 'Platform Blues' and 'Speak, See, Remember.' Watching the band play these songs live in The Slow Century DVD, you get the feeling that Malkmus broke up the band partially because they simply weren't tight and practiced enough to do these justice. It simply wasn't in Pavement to have that much discipline; in the same DVD, bassist Mark Ibold points out that he sings on 'Carrot Rope' but they don't play it live because he couldn't teach himself to play bass and sing at the same time.

I will concede that Terror Twilight isn't their best album. That title rightfully belongs to one of their first three depending on your taste. However, Terror Twilight also isn't as mediocre as people have been saying since its release. While Brighten The Corners needs a reissue to help flesh out its era and give it some context, Terror Twilight is the album that people need to return to without the baggage of context. If you merely listen to it and let it reveal itself for what it is, you'll find a lot to like here.

Same Title, Different Song

If you're like me, you probably keep your music organized on your computer by artist and/or album. However, if you arrange your collection by song title...

Song: 'All I Need'
Artists: Air, My Bloody Valentine, Radiohead
The Air and Radiohead songs are relatively close in tone, both being mid-tempo ballads that help anchor the emotional core of their respective albums. Meanwhile, the My Blood Valentine song is a cloud of noise such that no matter how loud you listen to the song, it always feel remote, far away, and up near the sun somewhere.

Song: 'Wildnerness'
Artists: Joy Division, Sleater-Kinney
Joy Division's 'Wilderness' couldn't be more different from Sleater-Kinney's if they had tried. Their's is an almost prototypical Joy Division number with a plodding drum, scrawling guitars, bucking bass, and reverb everywhere. Meanwhile, Sleater-Kinney's is a mid tempo rocker with impassioned vocals and everything redlined except the intertwining guitar during the chorus breaks.

Song: 'Animals'
Artists: Devendra Banhart, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads
Devendra Banhart's song is a short folk piece that reminds one of the time when he was an actual freak instead of someone constantly putting on a show. Sonic Youth's song, at least the one I have, is an early version of 'Mary Christ' from the deluxe edition of Goo. Meanwhile the Talking Heads song is a typically funky and catchy ditty about how animals are dangerous and untrustworthy foes. The line "animals are smart/they shit on the ground" is pretty ace, too.

Song: 'Dark Star'
Artists: Beck, Grateful Dead
I've always gotten the feeling that most people avoid the title 'Dark Star' because it's so associated with the Grateful Dead. In that spirit, you couldn't get much farther and yet closer to the epic, psychedelic, and improvisational Dead version than Beck's, which is a deadpan spacey dirge with all sorts of psychedelic flourishes.

Song: 'Venus'
Artists: Air, Low, Television
While I don't like the album nearly as much, I feel like 'Venus' is one of the best album openers that Air have ever done. I love the warm embrace of the synth washes that float up after the one minute mark. Then there's Low's 'Venus', which I only have on the hard-to-find live album One More Reason To Forget and which I remember hearing for the first time after I had broken up with a girlfriend. It's an atypically energetic number for Low, especially early Low, though it still moves at their usual slow pace. Anyway, Television's 'Venus' is just plain awesome from beginning to end. People tend to associate Marquee Moon with the longer guitar jams, but I think 'Venus' is the secret masterpiece, especially the backing vocals asking and reacting to the main vocals: "Did you feel low?" "No" "HUH?!"


Song: 'Untitled'
Artists: Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Burial, DJ Shadow, Fugazi, Interpol, Panda Bear, Pearl Jam, Sigur Ros, Sonic Youth
Yeah, are you really surprised that so many people in my collection used the title 'Untitled'?? Don't expect me to go through them all, since technically Panda Bear and Sigur Ros released whole albums where every song has no official title.

Song: 'Providence'
Artists: Deerhunter, King Crimson, Sonic Youth
I'll end on this one because I think it's the most interesting. All three of these songs are pretty different, but also pretty similar in an experimental way. Deerhunter's opens with looping guitars and adds layer upon layer of dreamy guitar sounds before descending into an ambient-esque climax with waterfall sounds and birds chirping. King Crimson's 'Providence' comes from the Red album though it is actually a live improvisation from a concert. This is the sort of song that's too difficult to describe. It trades off silence with free form guitar/violin/bass/drums drones and snatches of music and finally gains some momentum in its rollin' and tumblin' second half. Finally, 'Providence' by Sonic Youth is the (in)famous musique concrete piece from Daydream Nation that uses an answering machine message left by Mike Watt, a haunting piano, and errant white noise to produce a spellbinding, indescribable atmosphere that wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch film.

Video: Beck- Loser

I tend to think of the 1990s as one long afternoon in late summer. I have no explanation for why I feel this way, aside from the fact that many of my memories of the decade revolve around just such a time. And one of the best things about later summer afternoons in the 90s was watching MTV, because they played all sorts of videos back then--rap, alt rock, R&B, metal, punk, and sometimes even techno.

The 90s style of music video for the alt rock/indie crowd was usually to be as obtuse and strange as possible, while simultaneously having as little to do with the song as possible. With all of this in mind, I present to you the video for 'Loser', which opens with Beck in a blurred out Stormtrooper helmet, and only gets stranger and stranger from there.

My favorite parts of the video are Death cleaning blood off a windshield, girls doing aerobics in a graveyard through a polarized filter, and live footage of Beck cleaning off a stage with a leafblower.

This is the kind of stuff you'd typically see on those late summer 90s afternoons, and it made sense, somehow, even if you were a kid and knew nothing about absurdism, surrealism, and irony. Though Beck's subsequent videos are all "better" by any metric, this first bolt out of the blue simultaneously puts the lid on his first phase as a no-name anti-folk/junkyard singer/songwriter and points the way to his next phase as the superstar David Bowie-ish artist who tries on many hats, sometimes at the same time.