Rocktrospectiva: The Acclaimed "Odelay" Turns 30

Released on 18 June 1996 "Odelay" was the 5th., studio album by US musician Beck, The album featured several successful singles, including "Where It's At", "Devils Haircut", and "The New Pollution", and peaked at number sixteen on the Billboard 200. Odelay has been Beck's most successful album to date.  

In 1996, the grunge era was coming to an end. Beck was a small young man with strange hats, who a couple of years earlier had emerged from obscurity with his album "Mellow Gold" and that anthem of the underdogs conceived in the mecca of the invincible, "Loser," defied all the rules of the market with a unique album that would become a fundamentally important and influential piece for everything that followed. 

 

This time, Beck Hansen had a set of melancholic and rather sad folk songs inspired by the death of his grandfather, which were intended to form the fifth studio album of the multi-instrumentalist musician from Los Angeles, California. However, the choice of the Dust Brothers as producers would transform "Odelay" into a completely different album. Like a postmodern collage heralding the end of a millennium or the birth of a new era, 

 

Odelay presents itself to the world as a seemingly nihilistic canvas, yet it is in reality a meticulously detailed and elaborate work, conceived by one of the most brilliant creative minds in the music world of that time. Styles like folk, hip hop, country, lounge, punk, grunge, garage, disco, and noise, along with beatboxing and sampling (ranging from MC5's "I Can Only Give You Everything" to Pretty Purdie's "Song for Aretha," and including tracks by musicians like Mike Milius, Edgar Winter, Joe Thomas, and groups like Them, Sly and The Family Stone, and The Frogs), blend together to create songs like "Devils Haircut," "Hotwax," "Lord Only Knows," "The New Pollution," "Minus," and "Sissyneck" forming an album that, thanks to the constant rotation of its first single, "Where It's At," and its unique and classic video, would sell over 2 million copies, garner mainstream critical acclaim, and turn a guy like Beck into a star in just a few months. 

 

Anecdotes abound, such as the origin of its name: some say the original was "Órale" in honor of his Mexican friends, while others believe it stems from the delay in finishing the album and a play on words, something like "oh… delay." Another story revolves around the cover art: a photo of Beck's girlfriend at the time. Given the musician's apparent disinterest in defining the album's artwork, upon receiving the photo, he simply decided that the image of a Komondor dog (a Hungarian breed with a strange, almost dreadlock-like coat) jumping a baton would be the cover art for his new work, while the printed typography would be chosen by a record label employee.  

 

The album received almost unanimous critical acclaim, some observed that, like Mellow Gold, Odelay incorporated elements from various genres, including folk and country, grungy garage rock, stiff-boned electro, louche exotica, old-school rap and noise rock and also punk rock, bossa nova, Latin soul and mainstream R&B as additional influences.

 

Odelay Track List: 

 

1. Devil's Haircut

2. Hotwax

3. Lord Only Knows

4. The New Pollution

5. Derelict

6. Novacane

7. Jack-Ass

8. Where It's At

9. Minus

10. Sissyneck

11. Readymade

12. High 5 (Rock The Catskills)

13. Ramshackle