Share your videos with friends, family, and the world.

Some albums are universally loved, others are universally hated…and some fall somewhere in-between, like Beck’s 1999 release “Midnight Vultures.”

• View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2000 Vinyl release of 'Midnite Vultures' on Discogs.
• Save midnite vultures beck vinyl to get e-mail alerts and updates on your eBay Feed. + Update your shipping location 7 S 0 P O N S O A R P A 7 E E D-1-1 U J-1 0 F J-1.

After his debut with “Mellow Gold” and it’s hit single ‘Loser,’ Beck really broke through with 1996’s Dust Brother’s produced “Odelay.” With it’s sample heavy production and hip hop beats driving singles like ‘Devils Haircut’ and “Where it’s at’, he was no longer considered a flash in the pan and he began working on his next move.

Needing to fill the gap between albums, Geffen released ‘Mutations’ in 1998 against Beck’s wishes…which led to a lot of lawsuits that no one seems quite sure are even resolved. With its focus more on acoustic folk and blues, the album served as only an appetizer for the much anticipated “Vultures” with the DJ Swamp production.

I remember stopping at Aaron’s Records in Hollywood (R.I.P.) to get my copy the day it dropped and not being disappointed in the slightest.

“Oh, man, he’s done it again!” I yelled in the car to no one in particular.

But then thee reviews started coming in, and it was odd to see one critic hailing it as the album of the year and another referring to it as one of the worst albums ever. What was going on? Were they listening to a different album than I was? I checked the CD to make sure there wasn’t a hidden side.

There wasn’t.

At it’s core, “Midnight Vultures” is a soul album and many critics felt Beck was over-reaching his influences. Listening to it today though, I like to think he was just so far ahead of the game that some people simply weren’t ready for it. I feel ‘Debra’ is a timeless classic, destined for some future K-Tel vault. Is ‘Hollywood Freaks’ a classic? No. But it’s no less fun to listen too. Other high points are the haunting ‘Beautiful Way’ or the electric ‘Sexxx Laws.’

I keep hoping Beck will team up with DJ Swamp, or even the Dust Brothers and put out another dance floor killer like this album, but it seems his interests lay elsewhere at the moment. In any case, if you like Beck and let this album slip through the cracks because of the bad reviews, now’s your chance to give it a second shot.

Oh…and here’s ‘Debra.’

[Editor’s note: Below you will find a review of Beck’s Midnight Vultures written by Tom Fredrickson on December 6, 1999 for Pandemonium Online. Upon recent listens, the author has found that Midnight Vultures “holds up and sounds better than ever on the sound system mine has grown into.” Thus, to celebrate one of Beck’s finer legacy albums, we present you with this trenchant review, updated with two Youtubes. Fredrickson adds that these “videos do absolutely nothing to quiet the reservations I raise in the review.” He further would like you to know that “Sexx Laws features a cameo from Jack Black and represents well the mannerist phase of the MTV video age.” ]

One of my prized musical possessions is an LP called Souled Out, released by K-Tel circa 1975. This compilation of one-hit wonders, no-hit blunders, hidden gems (George McRae’s “I Can’t Leave You Alone” is even better than “Rock Your Baby”) and R&B landmarks gave even me, the whitest boy on the block, entree into the exotic world of funk and soul.

Beck Midnite Vultures

The seductive cross-section of styles on Souled Out lives on in Beck’s Midnite Vultures, which is a slice-and-dice tour of the last 30 years of African American pop: from the staccato horn accents, wah-wah guitars, and gurgling clavinets of high-sheen soul to the creepy busted gamelan sonics of mid-80s hip hop to the declamatory rhymes of rap. This tour de style has enough hooks per minute to satisfy the staunchest old school fanatic and makes Midnite Vultures the most immediate and immediately enjoyable Beck album yet.

Beck Midnight Vultures Torrent

Beck being Beck, however, this is not merely a genre exercise. Typically Beckian lyrics keep things off-kilter throughout. (My favorite but by no means the strangest or funniest line is, “You look good in that sweater and that aluminum crutch.”) But it’s the music — as opposed to the concepts, ironies, or beats — that consistently surprises. When the banjo and pedal steel drop from out of nowhere into the middle of “Sexx Laws,” Beck finds a way to fit them seamlessly into the mix. And the celestial choir that drifts into “Get Real Paid” feels like the perfect counterpoint to the weird white boy technofunk of that song. These jump cuts don’t seem like cheap jokes (something I’ve accused Beck of in the past) so much as epiphanies, unforeseen but in retrospect perfect.

The plentiful musical ideas on Midnite Vultures means that these songs take you on unexpected journeys. The druggy Sly Stone bass riff that opens “Nicotine & Gravy” inspires three or four successive vocal lines, which Beck eventually stacks up like a fugue before Arabic-sounding synth lines lead the song off in a whole new direction. This is the most meticulously crafted record of Beck’s career, and it’s also one hell of a lot of fun.

Beck Midnight Vultures Torrent Version

The momentum and confidence of the album are impressive. Barely a sound seems out of place — the most surprising of which is Beck’s voice. Think of vocals on past Beck records and you’ll probably call up that utterly affectless drawl of his — or maybe that inhuman vocorder rallying cry, “Two turntables and a microphone.” On Midnite Vultures Beck leaps into a whole new range — literally — by adopting an expressive falsetto that bridges the gap between Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites and Prince. Like generations of white men before him, Beck has found something in black music that allows him to say things — and say them in a way — that he isn’t be able to otherwise. Beck seems to have discovered a new kind of joy, sexiness, even tenderness in his music.

But things get complicated when the white boy blacks it up — even if it’s Beck, whose previous embrace of the blues, if somewhat dutiful, is well established. The line between homage and parody in music is a thin one, and it’s reasonable to ask if Beck crosses it in songs where he boasts of “packin’ heat” or what exactly he’s up to with choruses thrown out in his best ghetto drawl. In one way the album closing “Debra” is Midnite Vultures’s most impressive cut: a full-blown soul melodrama worthy of the Stylistics. And yet it’s also the most troubling cut, with Beck sounding like no one so much as Mick Jagger doing his best ironic-cum-sincere minstrel falsetto. With Midnite Vultures Beck enters the house of mirrors where race meets culture, and if it says nothing else, the album makes it clear that our most vital music continues to pick at the bones of the blues.