ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Beck

[#] Mutations (1998)

Reviewed July 29, 2023

A man, his guitar, and some saran wrap--all anyone ever needed.

Abandoned hearses, rusty graves, anabolic studs, tired soldiers, impotent and blind--a cold reading of Mutations' lyrics gives the wrong impression. Given Beck's tradition in the blues (one of his trio of 1994 "debuts" was a collection of suchlike songs, one later covered by Tom Petty), you'd expect this to be a pretty downtrodden acoustic record, but you'd be wrong. This album is comfy, breezy, gentle. The songs err upbeat, the band cutting the beginnings and ends of some of the songs with bizarro instrument spasms, and with all the harmonicas and twinkling guitars, the mood is dreamily bright. Beck underscored this in an interview at the time: "When I sing about decrepitude or corrosion, I'm not sittin' at the wailin' wall. These aren't depressing things to me. They're kind of humorous, ambiguous."

Mutations is easily my favorite of Beck's albums. It's a very precise, minimalist take on the wide variety of moods Beck can pull off, each and every song never far from a memorable vocal melody or a strong image in the lyrics. You've got your meat-and-potatoes acoustic rock on "Cold Brains" and "Lazy Flies", sarcastic kiss-offs on "Cancelled Check" (and I have definitely aimed this one at people before), the start of his Brazilian trilogy on the instant classic "Tropicalia", and sure, some droopy sad sack tunes here and there--it only makes sense. It's really the dreamy tracks that hit me the hardest; the closer, a murky little number called "Static", is as much a gorgeous portrait of exhausted, resigned depression as it is Beck giving you a friendly nudge onto better things: "Get up from your bed of rest/Been a long time since you've lived".

(Big recommendation: if you like this album, seek out a copy of the German promo CD. Aside from having some extended intros and outros, the entire thing has a mix that's completely free of any loudness war nonsense--we're talking DR values into the 12s and 13s. It sounds organic and gorgeous. There's FLAC rips online, and CD copies occasionally surface on Discogs.)

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"We Live Again", "Tropicalia", "Static"	"Lazy Flies"	Can't think of one

NOFI | LOFI