Cause when our POLL did meet, Girl you know I was packin' heat! - ILM Artist Poll #97 - BECK (Voting is open until Saturday, June 1, 2019)

otm

(if all of Sea Change vanished besides "Guess I'm Doing Fine" and "Paper Tiger" I'd be fine with that)

Sunday Sun is great but otherwise... The album served its purpose for me once but ive no need for it anymore really

For me, part of why I prefer Mutations to Sea Change is the change in his vocal style that came with Sea Change. He started singing differently and seemed interested in becoming a "good" singer in a way that changes the way a lot of that kind of material comes across in a big way, imho (not for the better).

But also compared to Mutations, Sea Change just seems like a louder record, which makes it less appealing as a late night listen. Like I can put on Mutations at home late at night and it sounds really right, but if I did that with Sea Change, before "Lonesome Tears" is over I'd be getting a call from my neighbors I'd imagine.

"Little One" on Sea Change is awesome (and also iirc a vintage copyright).

oh yeah "Little One" is nice, I like the grungy vocal line on the verse

tbf Lonesome Tears is the one I'll be voting for highest off Sea Change

I doubt I'll have room for anything off of that one

I think one of the main reasons Mutations is my favorite is that it's somehow much more successfully/convincingly aching than Sea Change turned out to be, without sacrificing any of the lyrical eccentricity of that period

― Simon H., Friday, May 24, 2019

until recently I couldn't explain to people who loved Sea Change why they were wrong and Mutations did it better. Like I wrote this morning, in 1998 sounds and arrangements still interested him; they bespoke the "sincerity" with which the SC lyrics dripped.

i think the songs on sea change, individually, at a songwriting level, are good-to-great. but all of them smushed together? with those arrangements? yikes

it’s like trawling at the bottom of a single shitty feeling

yep

which is why it sounds great when you're a teenager and a drag afterwards

o t m

It never sounded good -- worse, it sounded like an old man wit the maturity of a teen

i have some ballots, getting very excited about this poll. yes, i will be sending out confirmation emails starting next week. none have been sent out yet.

and this is the best thing i have ever seen in my life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXeCuhEch8&list=RDYwXeCuhEch8&start_radio=1

let's try that again
https://youtube/YwXeCuhEch8

one last time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXeCuhEch8

LOL @ him hugging the band at the end

haven't much enjoyed beck since i went through a huge phase in high school (round guero times), but i'm definitely considering submitting a one-song ballot with Debra

is frontin on debra eligible?

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

i won't reject anything.

but did make it a minimum of five songs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyCkhPTU13w

Ugh, I hate Debra

It is amazing to me that he was SO YOUNG when he made all this stuff, wow. I remember the interminable time it took between Odelay and the (rumoured) Midnite Vultures (with the stop-gap Mutations in the middle) and it was... three years? Between age 26-29 for the dude? Wow.

i don't really get why debra is so polarising? it's a solid enough slow jam pastiche, but nothing more or less

Yeah he had a turbocharged few years of brilliance and really only a few glimpses of goodness since then. It happens! xp

Sessions At W.54th was such a great show. Saturday nights with ACL and it were formative for me.

Here's the whole segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8AsbddEN4

It's bound to be a licensing nightmare, but I really wish PBS could create an HD channel that's just reruns of their vintage music shows (ACL, Sessions..., Soundstage, Live From The Artist's ?Den etc.).

I mean, look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessions_at_West_54th#Episode_list

as far as his 00s material goes, Sea Change is quite good and i probably like it more than most here do, but i agree with Brad upthread that it's a bit too much overall. the best tracks are excellent and the first side is especially solid but it could easily lose say two tracks somewhere because it's almost suffocatingly dreary. "the golden age" and "lost cause" are lovely tunes and i love the strings on "paper tiger" and "lonesome tears"

Guero and The Information are both pretty boring and are the most 'Beck-by-numbers' he's ever been. a lot of the tracks on both albums will come up with a nice groove from the rhythm section but then won't have anything else going for them at all. the maximalist collage approach from Odelay and Midnite Vultures is gone, leaving both feeling a bit empty. The Information especially is so bloated too, there's probably an decent (if unexciting) album amongst its tracklist but it really didn't need to be an hour.

Modern Guilt is kinda nice though, it's short and breezy with psych-pop tinges and a fair bit stronger than the previous two. it's not really on par with his peak period from the 90s but i'd be very happy with more Beck albums of similar quality.

My greatest beck-related memory was going to see the opening night of “The Core” with a friend that was so shitfaced whenever Hillary Swanks’ character Rebecca “Beck” Childs name was mentioned he would start singing “The Golden Age.”

Same -- Lazy Flies is all-time for me, partly because of the vocab (magistrate, debris, mangroves, sulphur, trawlers, opiates, syphilis, matrons, gigolos) but also because of whatever Waronker is doing in the second half.

Maybe too many syd barrett echoes for me in the first half of lazy flies. Second half better

If I tried to do a tracks list for Beck, it would probably be a perversely odd one. He was never an artist I deeply loved or listened to obsessively, but I always admired his boundless eclecticism which seemed the work of a genuine enthusiast and music lover and not a dilettante. But I think a lot of the stuff that's stuck with me over the 25 years or so have been less the hits and more the detours and homages and one-offs.

I don't know if you'd call this a Beck piece, as technically it's a "remix" of many Philip Glass works, but it feels like it very much transcends that: https://vimeo.com/51116926

A much cleaner recording of "NYC 73-78": https://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78

def voting for the philip glass rework

ok, i'm far from a beck know-it-all but some stuff i recommend - mostly late-period stuff because that's the era i got into him:

vampire voltage no. 6
deadweight
funky li'l song
gimme (extended version)
debra (kcrw '98 version)
santorini (record club: live at the acropolis)
nostalgia (record club: live at the acropolis)
nyc 73-78 (seconding)
green light
timebomb
scarecrow (el-p remix)
harry partch
banjo (the banjo story)

the commonplace is that somewhere in the 2000s he stopped making interesting music, but as far as i can tell that's not actually true, it's just that he stopped putting interesting music on his albums. nyc 73-78 is the outstanding example but not the only example.

― Flood-Resistant Mirror-Drilling Machine (rushomancy), Saturday, May 18, 2019 9:39 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is my feeling, heavily. Maybe the poll *won't* be just a bunch of 'Odelay' tracks? (Which I'll admit is my favorite album--but in putting my rankings together, I realized my tracks list and my albums list (as in albums-as-a-whole-work) are very different)

What’s the point of that Puff Daddy story? “It was like he was pursuing me and he had me, and I was discarded.” It sounds like Beck turned in a shitty performance, so Diddy didn’t want to work with him any longer, but is still polite to him. “Discarded”?

I'm listening to Mutations ("Bottle of Blues") as I type, a perfect post-pool album.

XP Some of it is probably Beck playing to the NME--tabloid-ing it up, if you will--other versions of the story involve Diddy bringing him in to freestyle over a track, because he was the hot thing at the moment, and Beck delivered a very Beck-y freestyle that was too weird for the room.

Usually the context is all the weird offers and doors that were opened to him immediately after Odelay.

I feel like Beck prob dodges a bullet there tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkCg-3nxT8E

he just split with his wife of 15 years (Giovani Ribisi's twin sister), that's a drag.

considering that ALLEGEDLY the tax haven / slavery farm / cult church that he had been avoiding for years swooped in and arranged this marriage and anchor pregnancy to another born-into-it devotee 9.2 milliseconds after Beck split from his long-term SP girlfriend, this sounds like great news for Beck, not a drag

lol I googled to see if I had that timeline right and turns out that she was unaware that he left her in June 2017 until he served divorce papers in Feb 2019

soooo.....

another born-into-it devotee

(like, literally: Beck's mother delivered the Ribisii)

Maybe the poll *won't* be just a bunch of 'Odelay' tracks?

This is a v tough call putting my ballot together, on the one hand there are many nonalbum/outtakes that undoubtedly rank among my favorite beck tracks, but on the other hand its hard to seriously make the case that "Where Its At" and "Loser" &c are NOT among the 25 best songs in his catalog. I suspect I'll end up adding the hits but underrating them in anticipation of them being on p much everyone's ballot.

i put on sea change today and feel like i've been listening to it for 13 years. boy are "lonesome tears," "sunday sun," and "little one" great though. feel like even beck takes a nap during "round the bend"

"sunday sun" p much the only song on that record that actually has mutations energy