'if Odelay sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt With Beck In The '90s

oh shit you know what song i heard in a grocery store in grand junction, colorado last weekend that i haven't heard in literally over twenty years? mmm mmm mmm mmm by crash test dummies. what a weird and surprisingly good song. connected to a strain of mostly bad 90s radio rock though. the low voiced acoustic thing.

'if Automatic for the People sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt...

Not sure if this is relevant to the subject at hand, but I did recently come to the realization that The Offspring's Pretty Fly for a White Guy is basically just Rick Rubin era Run DMC/ Beastie Boys, but with a 90s Californian spin to it.

Also there's even a remix of it by the Dust Brothers, which was among one of the earliest MP3s that I recall downloading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njRZDwR_ST8

Superman never made any money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMw4oko7RI

Basehead was basically Beck a few years before Beck, though not as good.

Yeah, growing up in Canada I feel like Superman Song was a bigger hit than Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm was, but maybe 6 year old me just took greater notice to a song that was literally about Superman.

Also, two albums after Mmmm Mmmm Mmmmm, Crash Test Dummies would go the route of adding drum loops, rapping, and vague "electronics influences", on their album "Give Yourself a Hand".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCKoub_8Y48

Play with Toys is so good :(

One of the best fluke products of that "something in the air" - How Bizarre

The last time I heard a Crash Test Dummies song it reminded me of middle period Swans — the quieter stuff on Children of God and The Burning World and albums like that.

Basehead was basically Beck a few years before Beck, though not as good.

Sorry, I think you misspelled "rather better."

XP now that would be some double bill

later than Odelay but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVWWl3mcr_w

So I really think the Beta Band are just an example of a rock band that listened to some rap and hip hop and their dynamic is more about channeling elements of anthemic Jock Jams into something more introspective. And maybe the stuff the singer did with less group involvement (like the s/t) is more interesting and holds up better, the debut at its best sounds like DIY Euro hip hop. But there are also beats that sound like Cypress Hill, they copied the Japanese rap from Buhloone Mindstate pretty much verbatim on one of their songs, their funk is the Madchester variety, and the energy on their tracks builds in a more linear way- I get why someone would call them "post-Odelay" because they're combining a bunch of disparate things in a way that calls attention to the disparity. But if there's a traceable lineage to the Grand Royal magazine kind of style it might be an obsession with appearing cool.

Is Luna's Pup Tent post-Odelay?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a8G_cqZMHM

This is probably one of the quintessential releases from that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Home_with_the_Groovebox

I was listening to a recent episode of Time Crisis (Ezra Koenig's radio show), and while discussing early Ween there was a pretty good discussion of 'funny white guy' music of the '90s, on a spectrum from nerdy/dorky/not concerned with appearing cool (eg They Might Be Giants, Phish) ---- to being concerned with cool, or possibly just being cool (Beck, Ween, etc). Maybe Cake is the exact middle?

Only learned recently than TMBG's 'Window' was apparently a goof on Crash Test Dummies and their ilk and suddenly it all makes sense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_VYHsWzqZI

Feel like Mark's Keyboard Repair had a big influence on acts such as Cornershop, Badly Drawn Boy...goofing around with different genres, fragments of songs etc.

Cake's "The Distance" fits the bill for sure, and though I don't love it, it's honestly aged better than a lot of the class of '96 buzz bin hip-hop dabblers

Can we clarify the typology a bit?

Like, is sampling essential? I don't think there are samples in Cake, OK Go, Luna, Smashmouth, Sugar Ray.

And can we usefully distinguish between hip-hop / rap and a general category of speak-singing (Sprechgesang) like the way 1950s ballads would sometimes have a spoken verse.

Good Work Everybody!

Here's some relevant recent discussion: 50 Memorable Songs Of The Late 1990s That Apparently Only You Remember, Even Though They Were Totally On The Radio And Stuff

Cake doesn't have sampling but it does have deadpan white-guy rapping (or "quasi-rapping) and the whistling synths imported from g-funk in a clearly "alternative rock" setting, feels like it fits

there's a lot of record scratching even on songs without samples

The Distance for sure fits. This thread makes me want to see a graph indicating the presence of vibraslap on charting singles from '89 - '99

And like a lot of stuff on here, it's more contemporaneous with Odelay than part of its immediate influence--The Distance came out like 6 weeks after the Beck record

cake is like the rick and morty of alt rock bands (this is a bad thing imo)

Can we clarify the typology a bit?

Like, is sampling essential? I don't think there are samples in Cake, OK Go, Luna, Smashmouth, Sugar Ray

No, sampling is not an essential criteria, I think if anything the point is more that record production techniques are employed which emulate something of the sound of a sample collage. One I mentioned upthread is mismatching the reverbs on different instruments so that instead of creating an illusion of depth or space, the reverb is there to make everything sound like it came from a different source, to flatten it or to make the production sound more cut up.

At this point even the Smashing Pumpkins had done a couple of things where they're constructing tracks horizontally by looping an extracted bar, rather than doing takes. One difference is they were looking for the tightest bar to loop, not some x-factor.

I wouldn't swear, but my instinct is Sugar Ray used some samples.

walkin’ on the sun has a sampled “big beat” (a la fatboy slim or any number of wall of sound artists)

oh sorry wrong shitty band

Hehe

Iirc, Sugar Ray sampled or at least interpolated* "Sauvecito" by Malo on "Every Morning".

*A key practice of this era

How many of the bands/artists mentioned so far had that tinny transistor radio effect as the intro of a track that opens up on the downbeat?

Fastball definitely. Maybe Sugar ray.

Sugar Ray had a full-time DJ member of the group. First, there was DJ Lethal, who later joined Limp Bizkit in the same capacity. Then he was replaced by the similarly named DJ Homicide, who is credited with scratches and samples, among other things, on their records.

that tinny transistor radio effect

See Luna IHOP above

xpost - DJ Lethal was in House of Pain before that, that dude had an interesting career

This is also the heyday of Songs With Fake Scratches, Vinyl Noise etc

LMAO at the fact the DJ in Sugar Ray was called "DJ Homicide"

songs with fake scratches have seen better days

Did you have music videos directed by "McG" seems to be a secondary identifier for these groups

Showroom of Compassion

Released: January 11, 2011

Genre: Experimental rock, alternative rock, classical, avant-garde

US Billboard 200: #1

(never heard it but what the hell's going on here)

mismatching the reverbs on different instruments so that instead of creating an illusion of depth or space, the reverb is there to make everything sound like it came from a different source, to flatten it or to make the production sound more cut up.

I think I know what this sounds like but what are some examples of this?

There must have been nothing else released on Jan 11, 2011.

I'm trying and failing to find a list of the biggest falls from no. 1 on the Billboard 200 but wiki says its in there.

On the Billboard 200, the album moved 44,000 copies, making it the lowest-selling number-one album since Billboard began using Nielsen SoundScan to track unit sales, until Amos Lee's Mission Bell set the record two weeks later

that list is here, the Cake album is no longer in the top 10:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_200#Biggest_drops_from_number-one

I think I know what this sounds like but what are some examples of this?

I cannot speak to the mismatched reverbs thing but I definitely remember some odd studio choices that seem intended to reinforce a kind of campy pastiche.

Listen to the Decemberists' "July, July!" for a song that was deliberately mixed weird, with the drums panned hard left and the vocals hard right (instead of centering both as I conventional).

Also I am given to understand that Smash Mouth's "All Star" incorporates the James Bond theme, in such a subtle way (lurking in the rhythm guitar track) that you can only hear it if you listen for it (Cf. a Switched on Pop podcast).

xp I KNEW Madame X would be in there.

Sorry, end of this divergence now.

I think of this as an era of songs that have "sexy" sounds but are utterly sex-less while referring to 1960s/70s sexy aesthetic tropes -- and we end up with Lovefool and Your Woman and, ultimately, Midnite Vultures.

Also, Pulp Fiction specifically ushered in a lot of what made Odelay of the moment.

Listen to the Decemberists' "July, July!" for a song that was deliberately mixed weird, with the drums panned hard left and the vocals hard right (instead of centering both as I conventional).

i wonder if this was a retro 60s pop thing, like some of those old Dylan or Beatles stereo mixes where it was just panning stuff hard left and hard right?

Also, Pulp Fiction specifically ushered in a lot of what made Odelay of the moment.

FLC again

I think I know what this sounds like but what are some examples of this?

― intheblanks

Well I think Odelay itself is a very very good & clear example, in terms of the way the "live" instruments and vocals are treated.

That Cornershop record is another, as is 'Fantasma'. 'Every Morning'. But I think all those records incorporate samples. Maybe a better way to say this... A lot of hip-hop productions use reverb to glue different samples together into a mix, to make them cohere, so this is kind of doing the opposite, taking sounds that were recorded in the same space and breaking them apart. In general, Toyoaki Mishima's work on Cornelius records I feel like approaches recording and mixing with a view to splitting things apart & I would name 'Point' as a good example of this that doesn't sample other records.

There's a little known band I have in mind i'll maybe post about later who are maybe the clearest example of like "impact of Odelay on 90's alt rock", including mismatched reverbs.

The connection between Odelay and Smash Mouth doesn't really exist to me

The mid-to-late 90s had a nearly simultaneous ska-fusion moment and a neo-swing moment, coupled with the enormous popularity of Pulp Fiction/Reservoir Dogs OSTs, and like... that movie The Mask, there was this generalised kinda kitsch blip that felt independent of a few of the progenitors suggested in this thread. Smash Mouth, to me, were most influenced by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones etc.