BeckBest Beck Albums Ranked

Odelay

rollingstone

10

“On his early records, Beck made it all sound so easy, people fell for the idea he wasn’t trying very hard. He was happy to play the role of a musical innocent — just a blond surfer-poet dude with a guitar and a dazed grin, the happy-go-lucky Snoopy to Kurt Cobain’s Charlie Brown. Now that […]”

Sea Change

rollingstone

10

“In 1994, Beck Hansen released his first major-label album. He called it Mellow Gold, and we all laughed at the irony: slacker caricature and coffeehouse hip-hop billed like a K-tel makeout platter. But Sea Change, his eighth album, is the real thing — a perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open […]”

Morning Phase

rollingstone

9.0

“On his remarkable 2002 album, Sea Change, Beck ditched his signature irony, break beats and jump cuts to vibe on the country-tinged singer-songwriter tradition of his L.A. hometown. Since then, the album's stature has only grown – even as Beck left his fringed-suede jacket tucked away in a closet. He has finally put it back on for Morning Phase, which features many of the same players and themes a”

Mellow Gold

pitchfork

8.8

“Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Beck’s ramshackle 1994 album, a quintessential piece of alternative rock, experimental folk, and hip-hop that felt magically displaced in time.”

Morning Phase

consequence

8.5

“The artist reprises his acoustic troubadour persona for the first time in over a decade”

Odelay

pitchfork

8.5

“Beck's Odelay-- the album on which this former folk-hop singer combined the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel-- is reissued with a disc of era-appropriate B-sides and two previously unreleased tracks.”