Beck’s Record Club Is Worth Joining

Beck is an odd musician to get a handle on — his 20-year career is a mishmash of pop commercial success and indie experiments. But it’s clear the man loves music the way Quentin Tarantino loves movies, and thus his latest experiment is one to follow.

This summer, Beck launched Record Club, a series of covers reinterpreting an entire classic album from the past. The first album up is Velvet Underground and Nico (AKA that record with the Andy Warhol banana on the cover), upon which he and a group of eight musicians collaborated, filming the sessions and posting them on Vimeo (under his full name, Beck Hansen).

The end result is a slightly mixed bag, depending on how sacred you hold the original Lou Reed-created tunes. There She Goes Again is transformed from a bouncy pop song to a chaotic mess, but when that same energy is applied to the much more electric Heroin, the result is a bold but faithful reinterpretation. Run Run Run is possibly the most distinctly Beck-esque of the series, relying much more heavily on keyboards than the original, but the combination proves to be downright catchy. I also liked Sunday Morning, which featured Beck’s brother-in-law, Giovanni Ribisi, on the glockenspiel — it proves to be the least risk-taking of the set, but still manages to charm.

Of course, this isn’t just an audio experience — to document this reinterpretation of a classic album from the 1960s, Hansen has invoked the visual style of the 1980s, pixelating and remixing the footage from the day-long recording session into a chiaroscuro eye feast. NewTeeVee doesn’t have a budget for psychotrophics, so I can’t say whether or not the footage would aide or abet any sort of tripping adventure, but the experience leads to a very low budget sort of music video that while being ever-so-slightly gimmicky, still conveys the energy of the performances.

The project is being distributed for free, and according to John Jurgensen of the Wall Street Journal, it’s led to a fivefold increase in Beck.com traffic. What Beck is paying in server costs, though, he’s regaining in buzz — for those looking to re-engage with his other works, Record Club is a fine gateway drug.

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