Beck - Odelay
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Free Music Notes for Odelay
Free Music Review: Super!!!
Hit: 5 Stars
Super good album! I was asked why I bought this album as I already had the non-deluxe version. Well, it's BECK!!!! And it's definitely worth it because of the additional songs and b-sides!!!!Free Music Review: so happy together...
Hit: 5 Stars
odelay is all rainbows and sunshine, it makes me that happy. this new deluxe edition has all the gooey goodness of the original, but it just gets better the more you hear it of course. plus you get some new stuff that is magical as well. i could not ever express how amazing beck is, how much i love him! Free Music Review: A uniquely half-baked reissue: pine for the days of CD Watchdog
Hit: 3 Stars
So let's get this out of the way quickly: Odelay is one of the best albums of the 1990s, and is very deserving of the deluxe treatment. And this release comes tantalizing close to actually doing the album justice, collecting (or purporting to collect) non album tracks, B-sides, and other errata to flesh out the Odelay portrait. There's enough wrong here, though, to make one question the $30 purchase price (and to wonder why exactly this thing was in the works for so long)...and if you haven't heard Odelay, you're probably better off grabbing one of the thousands of cheap copies of the original that're floating around.
First, the booklet. I happen to find the "interviews" to be sort of senseless, but I can see someone enjoying them. More problematic is that the lyrics that populate the booklet have been taken directly from a fan-site, errors and all. Universal claims that this was a mistake that should have never made it past the layout phase. I agree wholeheartedly...but it did, and so early buyers (or, perhaps, all buyers) of this disc get a distinctly compromised package. Great!
There's been a lot of discussion about the above issue, but not quite as much discussion about the fact that several songs here *differ* from the original Odelay we've grown to love. Apparently, the compilers grabbed rough mixes of several of the songs (and/or decided to remix parts of the album). The differences range from the subtle (the beeps that begin "The New Pollution" utilize a different sample) to the incredibly obvious ("Hotwax" suddenly has a very evident double-tracked vocal). Why? I can't find anything in the liners that explain why the deluxe edition of "Odelay" changes so much random stuff around in the original album. Given the other issues attendant in this set, I'm willing to bet it was carelessness at play here.
...because there's more where this came from! So we get some B-sides and unreleased tracks. Fantastic! Except where's Diskobox, which was a bonus track on several international editions of the album? It's nowhere to be found here. Worse yet--and I happen to think this is really freakin' inexcusable--several of the tracks that *ARE* here are taken from lossy (i.e. MP3 or AAC) sources. Deadweight and Clock, for example, have noticeable MP3 artifacts, and the corresponding poor frequency response...heck, "Clock" has some DAE artifacts at the beginning, to boot. Was this set assembled by having some guy go on the internet and download MP3s of some of the rarities?
And so on. It's nice, I'll admit, and it's great to finally have some of these B-sides get a re-airing. The idea of charging $30 for something so poorly put together, though, is what energizes the continued appearance of record companies as out of touch, greedy, and incompetent. In the days of ICE and CD Watchdog, this set would have generated letters for *months*...in this day and age, internet warnings will have to suffice.
Summary: If you haven't yet experienced Odelay, run run run to the store and get a cheap used copy of the album. This set's exorbitant price, poor liner notes, and sound issues (as well as incorrect mixes for the original album) make it a lousy way to get acquainted with the original work.
Free Music Review: NICE DELUX EXTRAS!
Hit: 5 Stars
Beck Odelay, plus lots of other stuff? I'm a little bit jealous, as I still have my copy of Odelay from the old days. This new delux version has a slew of tracks that us Beck fans had always known about, but never had such an easy time getting our hands on... I mean a SLEW!
FEATHER IN YOUR CAP, LEMONADE, THUNDER PEEL, ELECTRIC MUSIC... plus way more. Also you get a couple of songs that were only available at the time on movie soundtracks, or rare import albums. At a pretty decent price too. Good to know. This is when Beck still had a million styles and lots of cool music!
Free Music Review: Fantastic!
Hit: 4 Stars
I always appreciate it when bands release deluxe editions or anniversary editions of old albums with all the b-sides collected, which makes it a lot easier for music collectors like myself to "have it all" - we get to buy one slightly more expensive album rather than half a dozen or so relatively high priced import singles. So my one complaint with this collection is the absence of "Discobox", which appeared on import versions of Odelay.
Other than the liner notes also being a bit sparse, I am quite pleased with this release. And I have to confess that I don't understand the complaints about the high school interviews. Beck's always been quirky, so what better suits a deluxe edition of a Beck album than Dave Eggers interviewing kids who don't really know who Beck is? It's exactly the sort of irreverent tongue-in-cheek humor I'd expect from both Beck and Eggers and I found the interviews rather amusing.
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