Product Details

* Audio CD (November 3, 1998)
* Original Release Date: November 3, 1998
* Number of Discs: 1
* Label: Geffen Records
* Catalog Number: 25309
* ASIN: B00000DHYK
* Other Editions: Audio Cassette | LP Record
* Average Customer Review: based on 227 reviews. (Write a review.)
* Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,731 in Music (See Top Sellers in Music)
Yesterday: #5,586 in Music

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1. Cold Brains Listen Listen
2. Nobody's Fault But My Own Listen Listen
3. Lazy Flies Listen Listen
4. Canceled Check Listen Listen
5. We Live Again Listen Listen
6. Tropicalia Listen Listen
7. Dead Melodies Listen Listen
8. Bottle of Blues Listen Listen
9. O Maria
10. Sing It Again Listen Listen
11. Static/Diamond Bollocks (hidden track) Listen Listen
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com's Best of 1998
It's unfortunate how much attention has been paid to how this album was recorded--quickly, without the same level of studio fuss that marked Beck's breakthrough album, Odelay. That's a shame because our favorite chameleon has pulled the neatest trick of all: he's dropped the lyrical schtick that sometimes marred his sonic wizardy, leaving listeners to wonder if he even believed in the music he was playing. That's not an issue here. At times, he sounds like Ray Davies updated for the '90s, stripping himself bare with lovely, simple songs that linger long after they've supposedly ended. Beck may have made his initial mark with "Loser," a clever but insincere admission of inferiority; he's more likely to be remembered for the similar but more heartfelt confession of "Nobody's Fault But My Own." --Keith Moerer

Amazon.com essential recording
On his 1996 breakthrough album Odelay, Beck Hansen surprised a sleepy music community by blending funk, rock, rap, alternative, and electronica in ways that were both startlingly innovative and irresistibly catchy. Mutations is equally attention-grabbing but not in the gangbusters-pimp-rock-meets-indie-geek style you might expect. Reflective and plaintive, the album reveals Beck's more sentimental side with an eclectic collection of acoustic-based songs that will sound familiar to anyone who cherishes his indie-rock effort One Foot in the Grave. And don't think just because Beck's gone soft, he's gotten boring. From one song to the next, the chameleonic guru strums pensively, shimmies to a bossa nova rhythm, swirls on a psychedelic cloud, plucks Baroque strains from a harpsichord, and weeps countrified tears into a rusty tin bucket. On Mutations, Beck proves that an undistorted guitar and a bit of creativity can easily sound as exciting as two turntables and a microphone. --Jon Wiederhorn

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26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
the lost '67 dylan album!, April 9, 2000
Reviewer: R. Hutchinson "autonomeus" (a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
It's 1966. Bob is traveling at light speed. He's a planetary pioneer of chaos, a cultural revolutionary, having plugged in his guitar and combined surrealist poetry and social critique with rock and roll, creating one of the most powerful forces in the Universe. But he's going too fast... He "takes too much acid and crashes his motorcycle" (either literally or metaphorically). Now in one dimension he turns to a backward looking, simplistic faith in a Big Deus Ex Machina In the Sky, starts quoting the Bible, and playing country music. But in another dimension, he reacts differently to this crisis, and makes an album very different from JOHN WESLEY HARDING -- this album, MUTATIONS!

In this alternative reality, Bob opens up to all the experimentation of the time. He incorporates all the studio effects of the Beatles and Stones. He travels to Brazil and meets Os Mutantes. He unplugs and mellows out, but with a sense of the infinite. Of course, he's reading Samuel Beckett the whole while, he's just not cut out to be an optimist. But he embraces chaos in a forward-looking way, he adopts a realistic existentialist stance rather than searching for certainty. The world is absurd and futile, but that's the starting point, not the end! Somehow, Beck has channeled this lost '67 Dylan album 30 years later. It's probably the result of his discipline of cultural recombinatory praxis, opening him up to bizarre possibilities -- he caught a matrix of flux from the past. "Diamond Bollocks," the awesome hidden track, acknowledges this explicitly:

"...looking back at some dead world that looks so new."

Beck, of course, was frustrated that the prediction from FLASHBACK, the movie about Abbie Hoffman, hadn't come true (the '90s will make the '60s look like the '50s!), and so he turned to the high point of the century as his millennial statement.

Thanks, Beck. And thanks, Bob.