FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Beck - Mutations
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THE sixth studio album from Beck…
IN THIS PHOTO: Beck at Foxboro Stadium in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Erickson
I wanted to include Mutations in this Vinyl Corner. An album I would recommend people buy on vinyl, it was a different pace to the more eclectic and colourful Odelay (1996) and Midnite Vultures (1999). Perhaps displaying a more mature side and a more Folk-Rock sound (that would be explored again on 2002’s Sea Change), it showed that Beck Was an artist you could not define or predict what he would do next. Definitely seen as one of Beck’s best albums, he produced it alongside Nigel Godrich. Although it did not get the same sales and acclaim as Odelay, Mutations was a chart success. It won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. I want to include a review of Mutations, as critics have had some interesting things about an album that is one of the best of the 1990s. Many fans and followers would not have expected Mutations to follow Odelay. The two albums are very different, yet both are exceptional and are typically and predictably masterful. Before I get to that review, there are a couple of features that further investigate and explore a remarkable album. Stereogum wrote about Mutations in 2018 on its twentieth anniversary. They noted the shift and changes between Odelay and Mutations:
“By 1998, Beck was in the rare position of being both unimpeachably cool and absolutely huge. His 1996 everything-at-once album Odelay was an era-defining smash. He lodged alt-rock radio hits in an era where that still mattered, performed at the Grammys, losing Album Of The Year to Celine Dion. He swept the 1996 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Awards, made the cover of Rolling Stone, and was named the Most Important Artist In Music by Spin. He had become such a shorthand for “Smart But Accessible Alt-Culture Figure” that MillerCoors even shamelessly ripped off his whole steez for a beer campaign based around a slacker character named Dick.
Of course, no one stays in their imperial period forever, and one can only imagine how Beck felt, watching as the wildly free-flowing sound he and the Dust Brothers created on Odelay was immediately turned into frat-boy fodder by the likes of Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray. So with Mutations — which turns 20 tomorrow — he made a hard pivot, setting aside his free-associative hip-hop sensibilities for a series of cosmic folk songs that saw him trading Irony for Feelings.
After the tour for Odelay wound down, Beck recruited Nigel Godrich for his major work after helming Radiohead’s OK Computer, the other huge era-defining alt-rock album of the late ’90s. Beck and his crack live band cut a song a day for 14 days, for an off-the-cuff feel that Godrich would soak in his trademark antiseptic, Kubrikian sheen. The original plan was that Bong Load Records, the tiny Los Angeles label that first released Beck’s breakout “Loser” would also release Mutations.
Beck had worked out an unprecedented deal with Geffen Records that would allow him, in theory, to release albums with smaller labels, which is how K Records was able to release his collection of early lo-fi recordings One Foot In The Grave and Flipside released his hodgepodge Stereopathetic Soulmanure the same year as Geffen released his official debut Mellow Gold. But after hearing Mutations, Geffen pulled rank and insisted on releasing the album, marketing it as a detour for hardcore Beck fans while he stayed hard at work on the “real” follow-up to Odelay. No videos were made for the album, and aside from appearing on Saturday Night Live, Beck did little to promote it, but such was his stature at the time that the album eventually went platinum and won Best Alternative Music Album Grammy.
I get the sense that amongst critics and fans, Mutations is often considered Beck’s dress rehearsal for his 2002 heartbreaker Sea Change, trying sadness on for size before later going Full Desolation. But honestly, this is probably because of the album highlight “Nobody’s Fault But My Own,” which finds Beck beating himself up over unspecified mistakes over a sea of psychedelic strings that could have been sampled from Rubber Soul. It was a startling turn at the time, the effortlessly cool guy from “Where It’s At” asking aloud, “Pointing a finger, throw the book at you/ And who would want to dance with you?”
But listening to Mutations today, I think what the album tells us is that even when he’s trying to be serious, Beck is still a playful guy. “Cancelled Check” and “Bottle Of Blues” have a light, Hank Williams-worthy sway to them, complete with some light piano rolls on the former; you can practically see Beck copping a sheepish grin while tinkling the ivories at a frontier barroom for a bunch of prospectors during happy hour. “O Maria” might revolve around an oddly moving couplet that signifies the need to grow up already (“Everybody knows/ the circus is closed”) but it glides by on a ’60s melody that feels cloned from Donovan.
There’s enough fingerprints of classic rock songwriters, from the Lennon-ish melodies and chord changes on “Dead Melodies” through the Bob Dylan worthy whines of “Lazy Flies” that it sometimes feels like Beck’s aim was to make an album that if you found it in a dusty vinyl pile, you might mistake as a lost prize from the ’60s, à la Inside Dave Van Ronk. But while Beck is a scholar of music, he’s never been content with merely reproducing his record collection. Mutations is filled with dozens of tiny little Beckisms, choices only he would make, be it contrasting a wheezing harmonica with sci-fi synth wiggles on “Cold Brains,” undercutting the Beatles-like reverie of “We Live Again” with dread-inducing negative space or spicing his Brazilian-music homage “Tropicalia” with post-modern lyrics about isolation and a noisy sound collag”.
Another great feature that dove into Mutations noted how a different producer (Nigel Godrich) accounts for the sonic changes in Mutations. Wanting to make something more beautiful and emotionally deep than Odelay, perhaps, Godrich was a perfect producer to work with. It is noted how Mutations might be one of Beck’s prettiest albums:
“A new production collaborator
As Odelay rolled over towards a US double platinum circulation, it was time to get back on record, with a new production collaborator. Beck now teamed with Nigel Godrich, the British producer who had come to the fore with his brilliant coordination of the talents of Oxford, England tastemakers Radiohead. Far from any extended studio contemplation, they recorded Mutations in two weeks.
Working at Ocean Way, the Hollywood studio that proudly declares sales from records made there at one billion units, Beck, Godrich and a crack team of musicians started recording on March 19, 1998 and wrapped on April 3. What emerged was as confident, concise and cutting-edge as one had come to expect, no mere Odelay doppelganger but an even deeper, joyfully melodious exploration of Beck’s individuality.
Immediately after completion and before release, he was on to new challenges that included the premiere of a performance art piece featuring his grandfather, Beck and Al Hansen: Playing With Matches, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California. On May 24, on his only UK date of the year, a remarkable triple bill combination saw Beck and John Martyn playing at the homecoming show, at Haigh Hall in Wigan, by the British modern rock champions of the time The Verve.
Beck’s own summer tour of North America began on June 1, on shows that featured the additional attractions of Sean Lennon and Elliott Smith. On a massive show in New Jersey, this writer had the privilege of seeing Beck, on a bill that also featured Ben Folds Five, playing a triumphant set opening for the all-conquering Dave Matthews Band.
An album of exotic instrumentation
When it was released, on November 3, 1998, Mutations unveiled arrangements by Beck’s father, David Campbell and exotic instrumentation including tamboura, sitar, and the cuica drum. There were also contributions from distinguished players who remain with Hansen to this day, such as keyboard player Roger Manning, bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and drummer Joey Waronker.
The album went straight into the US chart at its No.13 peak, and was gold inside a month. Even if it didn’t go on to mirror the commercial achievements of Odelay, the record overflowed with evidence that Beck was now firmly established as one of the most innovative artists in the world. The following February, Mutations beat Fatboy Slim, Tori Amos, Moby, and Nine Inch Nails to the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Performance.
Gone was the sample-heavy hip-hop veneer of his previous triumph, and critics were united in their admiration of Beck’s refusal to take the easy option of repeating himself. “A collection of psychedelic folk-rock and country waltzes that couldn’t have wandered much further from Odelay,” purred the Los Angeles Times in its year-end round-up. “Another fully formed creative facet of Beck we haven’t seen before.”
The NME, meanwhile, advised: “You’d better sit down. Mutations sees Beck replacing the spinning turntable with the acid-rock lightwheel, the concrete streets with the long and winding road, retreating further from glaring expectation into the complex little universe between those fluffy sideburns.
“‘Nobody’s Fault But My Own’ strings its nerves out across those Wichita telegraph poles; ‘Sing It Again‘ is ‘Norwegian Wood’ tinged with rabbit-skinning pedal steel, while the deceptively cheery honky-tonk of ‘O Maria’ casts Beck as saloon showgirl, playfully chucking grizzled cowboys under the chin.”
Beck’s prettiest record?
Rolling Stone’s Nathan Brackett observed the album’s distinctive juxtaposition of dark lyricism (“the night is useless and so are we,” declared ‘O Maria’) and attractive melodies. “The twenty-eight-year-old Beck Hansen’s new album…brims with death, decay and decrepitude,” he wrote. “But in its own peculiar way, it’s also his prettiest record to date”.
To round off, I want to quote a positive review for Mutations. NME tackled the album when it came out. They observe how Beck did not release Mutations as a follow up or companion to Odelay:
“SO YOU'VE HAD ENOUGH FROM the all-you-can-wear trainer buffet, kicked a soda can moodily round the old-skool yard, and whatever the game is, you're pretty damn sure you know the score. Ready for the next round, you genuflect in the direction of the hipsters' Mount Rushmore, from where Yauch, Horowitz, Diamond, and there on the end, young Mr Hansen, stare down unimpeachably. You won't, however, be expecting their winter collection to include velvet tabards and incense, and as for the cacti and spittoons, well, you'd rather eat plaid.
You'd better sit down. 'Mutations' sees Beck replacing the spinning turntable with the acid-rock lightwheel, the concrete streets with the long and winding road, retreating further from glaring expectation into the complex little universe between those fluffy sideburns.
To be fair, Beck insists 'Mutations' isn't the official follow-up to 'Odelay' - that should hit the planet some time next year - but a continuation of the wax-cylinder folk unearthed on 1994's 'One Foot In The Grave'. There's no white-suited, jewel-fingered pirouetting possible here, the singer retreating to a massively unfashionable time where consciousness was peeled raw by hallucinogens, where psychedelia toppled into psychosis and the open spaces of country rock offered fresh air amid the patchouli fumes.
More 'Ohdearlay' than a joyous whoop from a cultural swinger, it's a bleak and gentle record - the opening 'Cold Brains' wobbles like a nervous breakdown on a plate, while the disillusioned 'We Live Again' suggests a man weary of the hip hype. "Dredging the night, drunk libertines", he croons, desolate, "I grow weary of the end". Only cocktail-shaker single 'Tropicalia' fits his now-established image, Antonio Carlos Jobim hanging in the 'hood while preposterous synth scrunching suggests a guest appearance by Ross from Friends. Yet as Beck's ancient voice becomes all the more intimate, the mischievous angel takes a turn for the worse, tapping into a timeless mythology of melancholy. 'Nobody's Fault But My Own' strings its nerves out across those Wichita telegraph poles; 'Sing It Again' is 'Norwegian Wood' tinged with rabbit-skinning pedal steel, while the deceptively cheery honky-tonk of 'O Maria' casts Beck as saloon showgirl, playfully chucking grizzled cowboys under the chin.
Once out on the road, though, Beck soon reins himself back into inner space, passed out on the floor of the Fillmore Ballroom watching his brain go by. The beautiful medieval whimsy of 'Lazy Flies' sounds like Beck was surrounded by jesters and maidens playing finger-cymbals. 'We Live Again' steps back even further to the days when Pink Floyd still had a definite article, but most terrifying is freakout, 'Diamond Bollocks' where booted fairies stomp out the peace-and-love embers. From fly irony to Iron Butterfly is one hell of a leap, and Beck makes it like Neil Armstrong on a helium bender.
You would expect nothing less. 'Mutations' might be the inveterate individualist's way of keeping ahead, but more gladdeningly, it swerves the style diktats and mint-condition rareties in favour of pure emotion. Sure, Beck remains the Midas Of Cool, but most importantly, it's his heart that's made of gold”.
One of Beck’s best albums is well worth getting on vinyl. A signal of what was to come on albums like Sea Change and Morning Phase (2014), those who were expecting an album as kaleidoscopic and weird as Odelay might have been surprised. Even though Mutations does have some exotic instruments in the mix, it is a much more composed and acoustic-based. Beautifully crafted and with no weak songs on the album, Mutations is beautiful. I have no hesitation in recommending it…
FOR Vinyl Corner.