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)

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

The contrasting takes on "it's all in your mind" say it all really

I'm so repulsed by the idea of Beck trying to Mean It that I can't relisten to Sea Change.

he's got several "Word on a Wing"s in his catalog, but he recorded them earlier in his career.

mutations is a top one for me besides the more obvious prior highlights, and i kind of liked modern guilt a lot actually

I remember being stoked to download the leaked version of Guero at the time, excited about the talk that he was back with the Dust Bros, and being generally disappointed except for two tracks that immediately stood head & shoulders above the rest, to my ears: "Send A Message To Her", which was the only track that successfully captured that manic collage feel of his 90s rockers without sounding tired or forced, and "Scarecrow", which in the leaked version was a 7-minute groove that included a long harmonica solo and felt like an extension of earlier songs like "Steal My Body Home" - I could not stop listening to it at the time. Then when I finally got the official release of the album "Send A Message" wasnt on it and "Scarecrow" was edited down to a weird cluttered single-length version that was impossible for me to enjoy after living with the 7 minute original version. So that whole record has the air of a letdown for me. Those two tracks and "Missing" are the only ones from that disc I ever dust off to listen to.

i think "girl" is wonderful and it'll be high on my ballot. still figuring out how i feel about guero though i like it much more than sea change

I gave Guero a listen on our weekend road trip, I wasn't super impressed and I don't think anything from it will make my ballot. It's a fine record and a breezy listen but it sounds like a scientifically engineered midpoint between Odelay and Midnite Vultures. Kinda sterile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jRGe5WbNuc

"scarecrow" is a really awesome song both edited and unedited

also like "go it alone" and "broken drum"; i think guero figures out what it wants to be in the second half (loose jammy bluesy acoustic record with the dust bros). i baseline like every song though, even if they don't manage the sonic depth of odelay the ways that singer-songwriter beck tries to flatten out postmodern pop beck ("missing" and "earthquake weather" for example) are really fascinating to me

also completely ridiculous "send a message to her" wasn't on the record, like cutting "the new pollution" from your album

huh I never knew Jack White wrote "Go It Alone"!

the black keys rode the sound of "go it alone" straight to the bank

i listened to the information a lot when it came out and i remember almost nothing about it beyond the singles. i have very little sense of what this album is trying to do (beck, pretty reductively and to his discredit, described it as a folding together of mutations/sea change with odelay but there's WAY more of that on guero) and the songs are mostly not there beyond some ear-catching detail in the production. but then once in a while the clutter recedes and the space clears around an excellent late beck song, cf. "cellphone's dead" and "new round"

still you can sure tell it took three years of on-again off-again sessions to record, what an overload of... restraint?

huh I never knew Jack White wrote "Go It Alone"!

― Emperor Tonetta Ketchup (sleeve), Tuesday, May 28, 2019

I think he's credited with bass too.

"Exoskeleton" section contains dialogue spoken by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze.

ugh no none of this

post-information non-album single "timebomb" RULES though

otm time bomb is the shit

I'm surprised how often I've heard "Colors" in the wild. Also, my students' college radio station put it in rotation in 2017.

modern guilt is pretty fantastic tbh

misread that as morning phase for a sec and was about to extend you an invitation to join the recording academy

I wonder if anyone will join me in voting for Colors and Morning Phase, and a few tracks from each? Maybe it was the result of having skipped all his 00s albums but I'm pretty fond of both. Absence makes, etc.

My favourite version of It's All In Your Mind is on The Bridge School Concerts, Vol. 1 (1997). Took me a while to appreciate the one he later released on Sea Change with a slightly altered melody and added instrumentation, but I still think that Bridge Benefit performance tops it. The One Foot In The Grave outtake is okay too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEN0NIkFHYA

first round of confirmation emails are going out...i will let you know when all have been added to the spreadsheet.

I forgot about that Bridge School version of "Mind", that really is a great recording.

While I've still got zero interest in in Colors - that Greg Kurstin pop production is definitively Not For Me - this thread may have convinced me to give Morning Phase a spin for the first time(even though my ballot's already in). Revisiting the 00's stuff makes me think that even if it doesnt fully satisfy there might be a few tracks that click with me.