Beck - One Foot in the Grave (1994) [24.96 FLAC] vinyl

  Genre: Rock
  Style: Singer/Songwriter
  Source: K Records KLP 28 vinyl
  Codec: FLAC
  Bit rate: ~ 2,700 kbps
  Bit depth: 24
  Sample rate: 96 kHz

  01 He's A Mighty Good Leader
  02 Sleeping Bag 
  03 I Get Lonesome
  04 Burnt Orange Peel 
  05 Cyanide Breath Mint
  06 See Water 
  07 Ziplock Bag
  08 Hollow Log 
  09 Forcefield 
  10 Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods 
  11 Asshole 
  12 I've Seen The Land Beyond 
  13 Outcome 
  14 Girl Dreams 
  15 Painted Eyelids 
  16 Atmospheric Conditions

  Recorded prior to Mellow Gold but released several months after that album turned Beck into an overnight sensation, One Foot in the Grave bolsters his neo-folkie credibility the way the nearly simultaneously released Stereopathetic Soul Manure accentuated his underground noise prankster credentials. One Foot is neatly perched between authentic folk-blues -- it opens with "He's a Mighty Good Leader," a traditional number sometimes credited to Skip James, and he rewrites Rev. Gary Davis' "You Gotta Move" as "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" -- and the shambolic, indie anti-folk coming out of the Northwest in the early '90s, a connection underscored by the record's initial release on Calvin Johnson's Olympia, WA-based K Records, and its production by Johnson, who also sings on a couple of cuts. Parts of One Foot in the Grave may be reminiscent of other K acts, particularly the ragged parts, but it's also distinctively Beck in how it blurs lines between the past and present, the traditional and the modern, the sincere and the sarcastic. Certainly, of his three 1994 albums, One Foot errs in favor of the sincere, partially due to those folk-blues covers, but also in its overall hushed feel, its muted acoustic guitars and murmured vocals suggesting an intimacy that the words don't always convey. Much of the album is about mood as much as song, a situation not uncommon to Beck, which is hardly a problem because the ramshackle sound is charming and the songwriting is often excellent, channeling Beck's skewed sensibilities into a traditional setting, particularly on the excellent "Asshole," which is hardly as smirking as its title. It's that delicate, almost accidental, balance of exposed nerves and cutting with that sets One Foot in the Grave apart from Beck's other albums; he'd revisit this sound and sensibility, but never again was he so beguilingly ragged