Beck - Odelay

The Tune for Today is:

Beck - Novacane

Keep on talking like a novacane hurricane
Low static on the poor man's short-wave
Stampede's got to dismantle
Code-red: what's your handle
Mission incredible undercover convoy
Full-tilt chromosome cowboy
X-ray search and destroy
Smoke stack black top novacane boy
Got so low your mom won't drum
Getting late with the suicide beat
Test-tube, still-born and dazed
Chump scum plays in the razor's haze
Got the momentum radioactive
Lowdown!
Circumcised for the operation
Don't expect some generation
Cyanide ride down the turnpike
Hundred hours on the miracle mic
Grinding the gears eighteen wheels
Rigs and robots riding on their heels
Fine tune robot making a sand box(?)
Heats and infernos burning like drano(?)
Down the horizon purple gasses
Semi-trucks hauling them asses
Novacane, hit the road expressway
Explode!
Novacane! Novacane!

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic)

Unlike Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, the indie albums that followed his debutMellow Gold by a mere matter of months, Odelay was a full-fledged, full-bodied album, released on a major label in the summer of 1996 and bearing an intricate, meticulous production by the Dust Brothersin their first gig since the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. Odelay shared a similar collage structure to that 1989 masterpiece, relying on a blend of found sounds and samples, but instead of lending the album its primary colors, the Dust Brothers provided the accents, highlighting Beck's ever-changing sounds, tying together his stylistic shifts, making the leaps from the dirge-blues of "Jack-Ass" to the hazy party rock of "Where's It's At" seem not so great. Like Mellow Gold, Odelay winds up touching on a number of disparate strands -- folk and country, grungy garage rock, stiff-boned electro, louche exotica, old-school rap, touches of noise rock -- but there's no break-neck snap between sensibilities, everything flows smoothly, the dense sounds suggesting that the songs are a bit more complicated than they actually are. Most of the songs here betray Beck's roots as an anti-folk singer -- he reworks blues structures ("Devil's Haircut"), country ("Lord Only Knows," "Sissyneck"), soul ("Hotwax"), folk ("Ramshackle") and rap ("High 5 [Rock the Catskills]," "Where It's At") -- but each track twists conventions, either in their construction or presentation, giving this a vibrant, electric pulse, surprising in its form and attack. Like a mosaic, all the details add up to a picture greater than its parts, so while some of Beck's best songs are here, Odelay is best appreciated as a recorded whole, with each layered sample enhancing the allusion that came before.

Tune the Album

The Chosen Tune Week
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Atoms for Peace - Amok	Morphine - Super Sex	The Joy Formidable - Maw Maw Song	Parquet Courts - Master of My Craft	Beck - Novacane