The good, perhaps obvious, news: Beck's Odelay still holds up remarkably
well a dozen years after its release. It's the most fully realized and purely listenable
disc in a catalog brimming with them, and the hopscotch that threatened to date
it immediately has been mellowed by history into something classic instead.
Fusing folk and hip-hop with whatever else struck his fancy paid off for Beck,
and "Devil's Haircut," "Jack-Ass," and even the slightly overdone "Where It's
At" sound as forward-thinking now as they did in 1996.
The not-as-good, perhaps as obvious, news: 19
tracks from the era, all gathered as bonus material for this deluxe edition,
don't hold a candle to the album itself. "Deadweight," originally released on
the A Life Less Ordinary soundtrack, is pretty great, but much of the material that
didn't make Odelay
will appeal to diehards only: An UNKLE remix of "Where It's At" goes on for 12
minutes, and the Beck-periments "Lemonade" and the deliberately obtuse blues
jam "Trouble All My Days" just fall flat. Still, there are diamonds to be had
in this rough—a chilled version of "Jack-Ass" almost bests the album
version, and a remix of "Devil's Haircut" by Mickey P recasts the song as DC
hardcore. And while the collection doesn't unearth any lost classics, it should
at least inspire a few extra listens to Odelay itself—never a bad
thing.