Mutations

Product Information

Beck Hansen has had one of the most interesting and singular career arcs of any musician of his generation, and his sixth album, Mutations, marked a turning point in a catalog filled with turning points. 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. There's an off-the-cuff wit to the songwriting, especially on Canceled Check and Bottle of Blues, and the performances are natural, relaxed, and laid-back, without ever sounding complacent. Why are ruminations on why guilt is both comforting and self-defeating any more or less valid than riffing on pop culture over the sickest drum break you can afford to sample? The low end seems to be the added component, lending significant weight to an already excellent recording.

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 collage. The lyrics are also much more somber and serious than those on Odelay, apparent in the songs "Nobody's Fault but My Own" and "Dead Melodies". Hence, I definitely think this should be in your Beck collection and if you're more of a fan of Mellow Gold than his newer stuff you will definitely not be disappointed. Every time I put this album on I definitely here something new, it seems to possess some sought of narrative. Spectre sonore respecté et pas ou peu de craquements audibles, plus qu'à espérer un repressage de ce niveau pour "Midnite Vultures".genre this would fall into , maybe blues , folk perhaps some of it , I normally find genres a bit confusing perhaps Beck has one all his own, although his albums all seem different you can tell he's put a lot of work into this.

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.

It is possible that Beck knows when he sings in a strained falsetto about wanting to nail your sister, he knows he’ll get a laugh, and that he knows when he sings in a resigned lower register about feeling “unmoved, untouched, unglued” in “Cold Brains,” he knows he’ll get a sigh of recognition from anyone that has ever felt sad and unmoored (which is to say, anyone), and he’s a skillful enough performer that he knows how to hit both marks.

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. 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. The record's front cover, a picture of Beck tangled in plastic wrap, was taken by the music photographer Autumn de Wilde.

It's definitely worth tracking down for the 'Every little nook and cranny Beck did in the 90s' collector. Can't really work out what any of these songs are about but I like his singing style and his interesting lyrics. Why should we think that writing songs about being horny and wanting to dance are any less valid than songs about watching your relationship fall apart? The production style was very different from that of Beck's previous album Odelay, which was heavily influenced by hip hop music and contained many samples. In fact, one of the nifty tricks of Mutations is how it sounds simple upon the first listen, then reveals more psychedelic layers upon each play.