Snooty-tootles, alternapardners, your tune-loon Claire O. has been running dither and yon all summer in pur-Nudie-suit of twangy little tales involving Aaron Tippin’s baccy and more festivals than you can shake a rainstick at, so I’ve missed like a fine spray any journalistic hoo-haw regarding this loser, baby. Heck, I know more about Breck than Beck. But life is like ABBA’s True Stories of the Highway Patrol, and I’m a super trouper, so without delay I Odelay’d, and with great care, a French curve, and tongue tip out the lip, drew and filled in with cross-hatching and stipple the following conclusions:
Have you ever sung into a running fan? Oh, Odelay, you must. It’s ever so warbly, like gargling 80th notes. And it’s the fantastic way to backup a Beck.
Beck dishes out more samples than the lady with the toothpicks and Lil’ Smokies in the frozen foods section of the IGA on a Saturday morning.
But now, like Ted Nugent totin’ a bow in the snow, let’s look at a few tracks:
“Lord Only Knows”: Grateful Dead (pre-Garcia-see-ya) sings a Gram Parsons song while a man stoned as the fireplace in an Aspen ski lodge breathes through a fuzz guitar in his sleep.
“Sissyneck”: If Claire O. was a run-of-the-pepper-mill eremitic critic emetic, she’d step two, three, four in the leghold claptrap of piercing the earlobe of this song with the eartag of country simply because it is rendered tender by a pedal steel; but lo (head high), the lyrics are what put the yipp in this ee-ki-ay, mummer. Lyrics lyke, “Sittin’ in the jailhouse tryin’ to learn some good manners,” and “I got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life.” Merle, I know where your pen went.
“Readymade” intros with a scratchy record sound effect. Claire O.’s exclusive advance copy of BR5-49’s new album opens with the same effect. Who sampled who(m)? Everybody pinyls for vinyl.
Well, kids and baby goats, like tape around the head of the guy on the liner art, I must wrap this up, so let me get down and sum up: Odelay feels like an erudite Tennessee wino sitting in a Greyhound depot beside an empty lot near L.A. listening to a song on the radio by a funk band giving birth to hip hop on a hot summer day in 1972.
