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Beck - One Foot in the Grave
| Pitchfork |
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The year "Loser" charted at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (1994, probably hoisted up by cassingle-crazy prepubescents like me), Beck actually released three full-length albums: the canonical Mellow Gold; the messy, skit-heavy Stereopathetic Soul Manure; and One Foot in the Grave, a set of ramshackle folk songs about, roughly, the apocalypse. He was 24. He was cute. He was smart, funny, and tender. Like a lot of great songwriters-- or writers, period-- he was as critical of his surroundings as he was enamored of them. He was also an entertainer, and it helped (from a marketing perspective) that his lines describing just how nigh the end is-- "Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare/ Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber"-- doubled as the kind of kooky shit that casual, young radio listeners are powerless against. In the year of Kurt Cobain's suicide and the popular awakening of bands as indescribably bad as the Stone Temple Pilots, Beck wasn't just our "consolation prize" (as Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music later called him)-- he was our escape hatch. One Foot in the Grave, out of print between 2005 and last week's merciful deluxe reissue, is a good companion to Mellow Gold, if not as essential on its own. Originally recorded for Olympia, Wash.'s stringently indie K Records (which spent the 80s tearing down the received image of the punk rockers and replacing it with research librarians and men who love embroidering), One Foot is Beck striking his most lo-effort, DIY pose-- one that fit not only into K's roster, but into an indie-music world where foot shufflers like Palace, Smog, and Pavement were getting traction. But it's also his personal take on Americana-- opener "He's a Mighty Good Leader" is a Skip James cover; the slide-guitar blues of "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" just sounds like one; and the folksy stasis of "Sleeping Bag" has more in common with Leonard Cohen than anything happening in the indie world. This is Beck, rustic. The guitars are not entirely in tune. His voice, removed from the matrix of samples and syncopations, sounds nasal and naïve....full text |
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| Rollingstone |
| Before he was a midnight vulture or a guero preaching the gospel of Latin groove music, Beck was a subversive folkie, inspired equally by Sonic Youth and Mississippi John Hurt. He cut this 16-track set of acoustic folk and country-blues for the label K just before his 1994 breakthrough, Mellow Gold, and its crudely recorded ballads and occasional bursts of gnarly distortion are clear precursors to the beats-based folk-hop of "Loser." Two of its songs remain early Beck classics: the self-deprecating "Asshole" and the haunting "Hollow Log." This expanded reissue features 16 additional tracks: outtakes like the a cappella ballad "Sweet Satan" andan early recording of Sea Change's "It's All in Your Mind."...full text |
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| Artistdirect |
| Recorded prior to Mellow Gold but released several months after that album turned Beck into an overnight sensation, One Foot in the Grave bolsters his neo-folkie credibility the way the nearly simultaneously released Stereopathetic Soul Manure accentuated his underground noise prankster credentials. One Foot is neatly perched between authentic folk-blues -- it opens with "He's a Mighty Good Leader," a traditional number sometimes credited to Skip James, and he rewrites Rev. Gary Davis' "You Gotta Move" as "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" -- and the shambolic, indie anti-folk coming out of the Northwest in the early '90s, a connection underscored by the record's initial release on Calvin Johnson's Olympia WA-based K Records, and its production by Johnson, who also sings on a couple of cuts. Parts of One Foot in the Grave may be reminiscent of other K acts, particularly the ragged parts, but it's also distinctively Beck in how it blurs lines between the past and present, the traditional and the modern, the sincere and the sarcastic. Certainly, of his three 1994 albums, One Foot errs in favor of the sincere, partially due to those folk-blues covers, but also in its overall hushed feel, its muted acoustic guitars and murmured vocals suggesting an intimacy that the words don't always convey. Much of the album is about mood as much as song, a situation not uncommon to Beck, which is hardly a problem because the ramshackle sound is charming and the songwriting is often excellent, channeling Beck's skewed sensibilities into a traditional setting, particularly on the excellent "Asshole," which is hardly as smirking as its title. It's that delicate, almost accidental, balance of exposed nerves and cutting with that sets One Foot in the Grave apart from Beck's other albums; he'd revisit this sound and sensibility, but never again was he so beguilingly ragged. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide...full text |
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