Ex Post Facto: Abums That You Listened To While Falling Asleep
By Nathan Fisher
A&F Editor

Beck
Mutations
DGC/Bong Load Records
1998

Beck gets accused of all sorts of pastiche-pop trickery. We're led to believe that much of his charm resides in his ability to out-weird Weird Al and get away with it. I think Midnight Vultures and his K Records release One Foot in the Grave (1994) somewhat unfairly brand him as a glorified Ween or Cake, who are themselves held up as narcissistic suburban white boys shallowly trying to imitate a sound for their own amusement.

But do I want to phone Beck and tell him-in that whiny tone all critics adopt on paper-to stop doing what he's doing? Do I want to be the guy at the drum and bass lounge telling the hipsters doing lines of coke off in the corner that they're being irresponsible? No. A thousand times no.

Lots of ink has been spilled over whether Beck is genuine or not. The newest release, Sea Change, has already given much ammunition to both sides and this should show you how pointless the debate is. For whatever reason, Beck has been apotheosized as everything we simultaneously despise and revere in contemporary junk-culture: we live in a world of throwaway pop that gets folded up neatly and stored away in museum archives. One final caveat for the idiotic debate over Beck's earnestness: he has an unreleased song called "Almost A Ghost" that no one has heard, ever.

That said, I would like to hold 1998's Mutations as something of a Jenin-style UN safe-zone for Beck. A UN safe-zone because we should hold off on our critical salvos and take note that Beck has cultivated an original sound that is most evident here. A UN safe-zone too because no one will respect it as the hounds of war shriek from the four corners of this earth and the red horseman of the apocalypse uses his authority to remove peace from all nations.

You've got blues, country, psych, bossa nova and folk thrown together with Nigel Godrichian bleeps and clacks in ways that lull you into thinking that Mutations is a straightforward pre-millenial pop album pointing equally to the future and the past, just like every other album released in the last five years of the twentieth century. And it's easy to think that this is a simple blend of junkyard melodies collected Dylan-style for easy dissemination to a literate segment of the music-listening public.

For years, I would put this album on every night and fall asleep to it because Mutations is so disarming, so faux lullaby-esque. Only when I was half-asleep could the liminal melodies and songwriting work most effectively on me, and so only after repeated listening did I realize that the album's predominant theme was death and decay. For instance, I never really listened to the chorus of "Bottle of Blues": "Holding hands with an impotent dream / In a brothel of fake energy / Put a nickel in a graveyard machine / I get higher and lower like a tired soldier with nothing to shoot." Weird, I thought.

The down-tempo album concludes on an upbeat hidden-track rocker called "Diamond Bollocks" with stop-start guitar hooks reminiscent of Nirvana: "Looking back at some dead world that looks so new / Offices and fountains that they named for you." If you've succumbed to a nap during a listen of Mutations, this appropriate conclusion will reverse the slaughter, wake you up and send you back out into society, refreshed and ready to do battle with the living as well as the dead.