Beck – Mellow Gold (CD)

From Beck comes Mellow Gold, an electronic and alternative album on Geffen Records. This is the CD edition. This edition was released on March 2, 1994.

Beck "Acid casualty with a repossessed car," croaks Beck Hansen. "Vietnam vet playin' air guitar..." Odelay would later herald Beck as pre-Millennial jester without compare, but 1993's Mellow Gold finds Beck slumming in The City of Angels, working in a video store for four dollars an hour. Quite rightly, he's got the blues, but there's plenty more besides. Mellow Gold is a grimy Polaroid of fried white-trash invention. Reconciling the painfully fashionable grunge aesthetic with the drunken verbiage of the Beat Generation, Mellow Gold founded the slacker generation, and "Loser"--the opening track--became its unofficial anthem. A concept album of sorts, Mellow Gold narrated the backdrop of Los Angeles as seen from the bottom of the dustbin, framed with the impoverished strains of fractured, missing-stringed folk and ramshackle white-boy hip-hop. Time would prove, though, that Beck was no slacker; Mellow Gold provided the scrawled blueprint for Beck's next major label album, Odelay which would prove one of the defining albums of the 1990s. --Louis Pattison