I've always had a bit of a funny relationship with Beck. Not him personally, I hardly know the lad - it's his music. My earliest memory of him is when he appeared on Top Of The Pops performing his first hit Loser, with a backing band of old aged pensioners. I was really taken aback by this, but I didn't bother buying the single for some unknown reason, never mind the album, Odelay. I'd bought myself some specialist music-snob headphones in the mid 1990s, which blocked out all music that didn't wear a Fred Perry polo shirt and desert boots (I blame the video for Blur's Chemical World personally), so it took me until hearing The New Pollution at Liquidation in Liverpool to realise Beck was a complete genius. I still wasn't moved enough to actually hand over any pretty green for his recorded material though. Even as late as last year, although you could have played me Tropicalia and I'd be transported back to late 1998; Sexx Laws and I'd party like it was 1999 - I'd be no closer to owning one of his albums than I would be owning a U2 album, And I definitely wouldn't have classed myself as a Beck fan.
Chemtrails stopped me in my tracks. It's so wonderfully dark and intense for what is essentially a pop song, switching with ease between sparse verses and throbbing choruses, all wrapped up with an ethereal production which gives it an almost chilling quality. I was so impressed; I bought the album, probably due to being momentarily possessed by the ghost of Victor Kiam. Modern Guilt is a fantastic album too, in a mangled-collection-of-disparate-entities kind of way. Sometimes albums are just better like that, it's like listening to a compilation tape. I'm going to start getting the rest of his albums soon. I'm a Beck fan, after all.
I can't find an official promo video for the song, so here it is with some pretentious guff over the top...
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