Stereopathetic Soulmanure

In the event that the curious listeners who loved Mellow Gold for more than just “Loser” started fiending for extra Beck in ’94, they had a couple routes to take that summer — and one of them was an off-ramp straight into an abyss of near-total cacophony. Released just weeks before his major-label debut, this collection of tape-deck experiments and lo-fi fuckarounds on the Flipside punk fanzine’s label is the closest we got to hearing an uninhibited version of Beck in peak anti-folk mode, proof of his time in the avant-absurdist microscene that brought him to the table in the first place. And it’s the least-casual listen in his entire catalog. When the whole thing opens with “Pink Noise (Rock Me Amadeus),” a toxic-waste blues lurch that explodes into guttural full-tilt bellowing wall-of-distortion guitar sludge caustic enough for Amphetamine Reptile, and that’s one of its catchier songs… well, yeah, maybe “for the fans” is the applicable term here. Some of this stuff is engaging just off how clearly broken it sounds: the falsetto/downpitched self-duo “Total Soul Future (Eat It)” is like a ’71 Rolling Stones song where the gunk that makes your fingers sticky turns out to leave chemical abrasions, while the swamp-monster sludge-trudge “Rollins Power Sauce” was deranged enough that it inspired a long-standing grudge from the titular Black Flag frontman himself. And even when Beck goes acoustic, he loves to hang out in places Jimmie Rodgers never thought to tread — like the asphalt bluegrass of “One Foot in the Grave” (where a confrontation with Satan fails to distract him from his condiment shortage) and the Carter Family hijack “Today Has Been A Fucked Up Day” — even when he also proves perfectly capable of finding the sincerity in a happenstance field-recording encounter with a homeless man who sings a mean (if incomplete) “Waitin’ for a Train.” But for all the explosions of pigfuck noise and cassette-hiss jank, Stereopathetic Soulmanure shows welcome glimpses of Beck’s friendlier evolutions. “Rowboat” is a country-folk beaut replete with a lead from pedal steel session great Leo LeBlanc; its lonesome sincerity made it worthy of a Johnny Cash cover just two years later. “Thunder Peel” is revered in a later, non-album-track form as one of his hookier rock numbers, but the version here is giddy over how dissonant it sounds in its grunge-mocking rubber-band queasiness — and still feels like it could’ve been a college-radio hit anyways. And his sense of humor was rarely more engaging than it is on “Satan Gave Me A Taco,” another reckoning with folk’s relationship with the devil that starts with the most repellent eating experience imaginable and unexpectedly culminates in a last-verse rock-star rise-and-fall story almost as mercilessly cliche-mocking as the entirety of ‘Walk Hard’. Beck would get a lot bigger after this one, but if this album — a paradox of amiable confrontation — is a perfect document of how strange he could get before he became a star.