Beck

Odelay

So Much Was Made of So Little

Review Score:

(6/10)
Is this album, called groundbreaking and classic when it was released, going to matter to anyone in 10 years? Of course not.

ODELAY was embraced at a time when American culture was drenched in irony and pop-culture regurgitation. Not surprisingly, the ironic-nostalgia fad ran SO deep that no one stopped to think about how the music would age once the retro-waves it was riding crashed on the sand...hence the blind worship of this record.

Beck also benefited from the bizarre notion that "blending styles" was an inherently noble act. Didn't matter if the styles were blended clumsily. It was all about the musical blender, man. Basically, it was multi-culturalism dogma creeping into the music scene, and the results weren't pretty.

Once rocks fans clear their heads of all the bad irony and musical crossbreeding forced on them in the past ten years, ODELAY's status is going to take a serious tumble.

That said, the record isn't all bad. "Jack-Ass" is a timeless tune, "Derelict" is damn catchy, and "Novocane" is a nice jolt of adrenaline. Otherwise though, there are a lot of forgettable moments on ODELAY, which precludes it from being deemed a masterpiece.

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