One Foot in the Grave by Beck

One Foot in the Grave, Beck's fourth studio album, came out on the indie label K Records in June 1994, though he'd actually made it before Mellow Gold; it only surfaced after that album had turned him into a hit and a critical darling. Calvin Johnson, K's founder and the Beat Happening frontman, produced it, co-wrote some songs and sang backup, and it was cut at Dub Narcotic Studio, which was then set up in Johnson's basement.

You can hear the basement. It's a creaky, lo-fi folk record, full of rickety acoustic strumming, with nods to the old songs of Skip James and the Carter Family, and players from Built to Spill (James Bertram and Scott Plouf), Love as Laughter's Sam Jayne and Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America. It never charted, but it strengthened his standing with critics just ahead of Odelay. It had sold 168,000 copies in the US by 2008, and in 2009 his own Iliad label reissued it with 16 bonus tracks.

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