Beck Week, Day 5

Wrapping it up with Beck week, I thought I'd talk about an album that I didn't truly appreciate until more recently:  One Foot in the Grave.




Not long after Mutations had come out, I was talking about Beck with some friends and one of them mentioned two albums:  Stereopathic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave.  As I had mentioned earlier this week, I was living in the middle of nowhere without much access to music beyond magazines and TV.  This conversation blew my mind, as I couldn't believe that there were two more Beck albums out there that I had never heard before.  Part of me was in shock that I didn't know about them.  The other part of me said: Give them to me now.

For years, all I had were copies of Stereopathic and One Foot that I recorded on some cassette tapes from the CDs that I borrowed from said friend.  The Stereopathic tape certainly got more play too, as I could relate a little more to it it's noisy lo-fi weirdness a little more than One Foot's folkiness.  I did listen to One Foot from time to time, more so in the 00s when I could carry around the mp3s with me on an iPod.  However, it wasn't until the reissue of the album in 2009 that I really gave the album its due.

And, man, did I feel stupid for waiting so long.

I've read many times over the years that of the three albums released by Beck in 1994 (Stereopathic, Mellow Gold and One Foot), Mellow Gold is considered the best.  Not just because it had such a monster hit in "Loser," but because it was a legitimately better album.  Perhaps it was because I didn't start listening to Beck heavily until the Odelay era, but Mellow Gold never resonated with me as much as the rest of his early catalog.  Don't get me wrong, I do love the album, and there are plenty of songs from it that I hold dear.  But, especially now in hindsight, One Foot is leaps and bounds above both other albums. 

It is, essentially, Beck playing lo-fi folk material with a bunch of friends.  What a bunch of friends:  Calvin Harris of Beat Happening (that's him on the album cover, next to Beck with his Kool Aid scarf), Chris Ballew who would later front The Presidents of the United States of America and members of Built to Spill, among others.  The songs tend to range from almost-love songs to, mostly, strange post-apocalyptic folk songs.  I don't mean that as some obtuse description of the songs, either.  Most of the lyrics on this album are strangely bleak and seem to refer to a world that's gone to hell (while Beck & Co., sit idly by). 

The most notable thing about this album is how relaxed and breezy this album feels.  It literally feels like the bi-product of a bunch of friends sitting around on a couch and asking each other:  "So, what do you want to do today?  Make a record?  Ok, cool, let's do it."

Even the most upbeat songs on the album, like "Burnt Orange Peel" sound like a bunch of guys who are just pretending to be excited after getting their nap interrupted.  That's not a bad thing at all.  It's a theme shared by a lot of Beck's earlier music, it just so happens to be perfected on this album.  "Loser" was the introduction to this weird thrift store slacker, but One Foot is like an entire documentary. 

Best songs here?  That's hard to say, because there's a wide variety of songs on this album - it's all a matter of the mood I'm in when I listen to it.  Usually, "I Get Lonesome," "Cyanide Breath Mint" and "Asshole" are my go-to songs, but I've come to really enjoy some of the more understated folk songs on the album, especially the take on the traditional song "He's a Mighty Good Leader."

To wrap up this rambling, One Foot is just as vital and essential a piece of Beck's discography as Mellow Gold is.  In fact, I would say that One Foot goes even further, laying the building blocks for later albums like Mutations and Sea Change (which even sees Beck re-recording music from the One Foot era). 

With that said, that takes care of Beck Week.  I realize that these entries are more personal opinions, feelings and memories than critical analyses, but that was exactly the point:  to reflect on some of the memories and thoughts that made Beck's music so important to me and its contributions to my passion for music.