Odelay by Beck

Odelay, Beck's fifth studio album, came out on DGC Records in 1996, and it sounds like somebody raided a thrift store, a record crate and a junkyard and taped the lot together into a party. Beck produced it with the Dust Brothers, with Mario Caldato Jr., Brian Paulson, Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf also credited, and the result is a cut-and-paste blowout of alternative rock, noise, hip-hop breaks and even country rap, with Bong Load Custom Records along for the ride.

"Where It's At" is the slacker lounge-funk anthem, all woozy keys and samples, cool as a busted swimming pool. "Devil's Haircut" rides a fuzzy, stomping riff; "The New Pollution" struts with a groovy, retro swing; "Jack-Ass" slows the whole thing down to a mournful, dusty shuffle; and "Hotwax" is all scratched-up swagger. It never settles into one style for long, and that's exactly the point.

The record climbed to number 16 on the Billboard 200 and kept selling: by July 2008 it had moved 2.3 million copies in the US, making it Beck's most successful album to date. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, picked up an Album of the Year nomination, and has kept turning up on critics' lists of the greatest records of the 1990s and of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.