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[Alucard]

I've heard this talked about and am curious. Has Beck ever released a blues album? I only own Odelay...really want Sea Change. But yeah, Beck and blues?...

 

[Mermandala]

Mutations. It's not all blues though.

EDIT: thinking about it I'd hardly call it a blues album at all, but I'm sure this is what they were talking about.

nonetheless it RAWKS!

EDIT 2: HOLY SHEET! I plum fergot 'bout "One Foot in the Grave".

 

[Triumph]

Uh, I'm pretty sure that it's an older, pre-Mellow Gold release called "One Foot in the Grave".

*checks cd collection* Yes, yes it is. Hard to find these days probably.

 

[firex]

yeah, one foot in the grave.

well, actually, i don't know if it's blues but it's definitely moodier than his other stuff. it's also probably my favorite.

 

[Dilbert]

One Foot In The Grave is frickin' AWESOME. It remains my favorite Beck album, although it's wickedly different from almost all of his other stuff.

 

[Alucard]

One Foot In the Grave, eh? Alright, I'm banking on that being the album since I'm going to order it from Amazon.ca.

 

[Fei]

Sea Change is by far the closest thing to blues Beck has done. Mutations had some that leaned, but it vertainly wasn't a blues album.

 

[sc0la]

I love how Beck can drastically change the tone of each new album he makes but still sound like nothing but beck.

I really like most of his albums with the last three being my favs (mutations, midnight vultures, and sea change)

 

[Triumph]

Beck could fart on a snare drum, record it, and it would be Art.

 

[hXc_thugg]

Sea Change is by far the closest thing to blues Beck has done. Mutations had some that leaned, but it vertainly wasn't a blues album.

Sea Change sounds nothing like the blues. You're a crazy person.

 

[swoon]

one foot in the grave is awful and more folk than blues. mutation is more blues, i guess because he quotes a lot of blues lines in his songs. but i mean.

 

[B-B-Bomba!]

With due respect, the question itself is an invitation to fuck in clusters. Beck only makes Beck albums! Although I sympathise in that each one seems to have tacked itself onto the arse of a particular genre, like a priceless jewel that no-one notices. Like, this familiar brand of sound, only viewed through a Beck-lens. Here, you wanna see what I think of this shit?

I don't understand the truth of the older music categorisations well enough to say whether Mutations or One Foot is more blues than any of his other albums. Often I find a category of music, that I though I understood what it was, will turn out to really have referred to something else that black folks made yonks beforehand. What the hell does soul mean? I'm sure the answers are simple enough to come by, if your ear has the time ... I suppose what I must mean is that I'm just a well-meaning amateur.

However I think from my reading of Beck, that his roots are in that old country, bluegrass, jumpin round a banjo kind of thing? I think that sensibility is what cascades down and through his other work. Really you could say he's just a hijacker, but I just can't get enough of that sound, nor that sense for the absurd. Beck-lenses are where it's at.

Anyway anyway anyway. Taking Leadbelly as a yardstick for what constitues blues (getch'asses some Leadbelly, people!), One Foot is definitely the album that best adheres to the low fi, wilderland ethos, and also the first one he managed to round the end of, so that the whole thing was actually an album, and the whole thing sounds finished. It doesn't, like Mellow Gold or Soulmanure, eventually dissolve into musical gibberish, as Beck gleefully rides his inability to articulate the end of whatever sentence it was he started.

BUY MORE BECK, and START WITH ONE FOOT. It's the bomb-shizzly. Also, what does anyone know about the new album? I need dates, and I need times!