REVIEW: Beck, Mutations (Bong Load/DGC)
- Daniel Aloi
Just for the creative and commercial chances Beck Hansen takes, for all the genres he steps into, you gotta love the guy.
While not the experimental stretch Odelay was, Mutations offers an important side to this artist that most fans seem to miss, but many of the rest seem to love -- the folkie in him.
Most of the 12 tracks on Mutations are seriously grounded in '60s music and heavy on psychedelia and British and American folk rock. Some other roots music -- blues riffs, country beats -- and blasting electric guitars are thrown in for leavening.
The crystalline production by Beck and Nigel Godrich (Radiohead) is among this album's greatest attributes.
The lyrics also are among Beck's best to date, containing some stunning imagery and numerous symbols of death, loss and dissipation: "My love is a room of broken bottles and tangled webs," he sings in "Sing It Again." He closes "Dead Melodies" with: "Cinders and chaff/ laugh at the moon/night birds will cackle/rotting like apples on trees/sending their dead melodies/ to me."
The psychedelic motif is set by the opener, "Cold Brains," streaming consciousness ("unmoved, untouched, unglued") on mind-expanding multitracked vocals and folkie riffs on guitar, keyboards and harmonica. "Dead Melodies" is almost pure mountain folk, while "We Live Again" and "Lazy Flies" recall the British folk vanguard of Steeleye Span or Donovan.
"Canceled Check" is a loping country stomp with acoustic guitarist Smoky Hormel (who's played with John Doe and tours with Beck), drummer Joey Waronker and pedal steel player Greg Leisz. The track seems to be live and it ends with a cacophony of things breaking or falling apart. "Tropicalia" floats on Latin jazz, as Beck describes the street-level social and policital breakdown of formerly exotic foreign locales: "Misery waits in vague hotels/to be evicted."
Listening through to the end, "Static" is dreamy and starry-eyed, very close to Beck at his major-label trippiest. And a hidden track just blisters with pumping rock'n'roll fury, occasionally pausing for the sound of birds chirping. That may be a preview of the next "official" Beck album, due out in 1999.
Wait, isn't this a Beck album?
Well, sure it is. But it isn't meant to be perceived as the BIG Beck album. Before he decided to release it on DGC, the songs here were originally meant for his side deal with the indie Bong Load Records. My advance copy states Beck sees it as more of a "parenthetical" work -- "but he does not consider it as the official follow-up" to the critical and commercial 1996 hit Odelay. I personally think that's just a sop to Geffen, a codicil for the fans and critics expecting another groundbreaking masterwork.
"It's a collection of dirges and waltzes," Beck said of this new album back in June, to an upstate New York audience. He deadpanned: "So it's for the hip-hop market -- filling that need." (For the record, "O Maria" may be the only dirgelike thing here).
Actually, it's a rich and rootsy, resourceful set of songs, and a fine companion to his One Foot in the Grave album (another one-off). Fans of that will certainly dig just about all of this.
And fans of keyboard player (and Jellyfish/Imperial Drag alum) Roger J. Manning's satirical/worshipful moves in The Moog Cookbook will appreciate all the cheesy and scary, inner- and outer-spacey sounds he brings to the mix on many of the tracks.
When Beck performed some of this new material on his summer tour, it met with some indifferent, often rude response from his young, spoon-fed audiences. At the show I saw in June, he gave his all to "Nobody's Fault But My Own," accompanied only by his acoustic guitar -- and was roundly ignored. The crowd noise nearly drowned him out.
Unfortunately, the kids just wanted to hear "Loser" and a version of "I Wanna Sex U Up" and see the white-suited wonder bust a move. This is the kind of audience disrespect and apathy both Beck and Neil Young frequently railed against on last year's H.O.R.D.E. Tour. If the audience can't get into what they've paid and traveled to see, it's their loss.
For my money, though, Beck has made one of the best Dylan albums of the year, if not one of the best overall. Whatever its ultimate commercial fate, history should treat Mutations well. I'll spin it for years to come, I know that.
