Record Club

The Arc of Record Club

The pivots — what forced Record Club to reinvent.

1. 01

   The 1967 Folk-Rock Blueprints

   Beck kicked the experiment off in 2009 by dragging Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Bram Inscore, and Giovanni Ribisi into the room to cut The Velvet Underground & Nico before sundown. The vibe was pure garage urgency, capturing cracked takes on a budget of zero prep. Later that year, they pivoted straight to Songs of Leonard Cohen, swapping the lineup for MGMT, Devendra Banhart, and Andrew Stockdale. The result turned austere acoustic poetry into communal, hallucinatory freak-folk that exposed the bare bones of both classic tracklists.

2. 02

   Psych Obscurity and Sleazy Pop

   Early 2010 found the project taking genuine left turns, starting with Skip Spence's fractured 1969 freak-out Oar. Beck hauled in Wilco, Leslie Feist, Jamie Lidell, and soul legend James Gadson behind the kit to tackle pure acid-damaged songwriting with warm midwestern grit. Weeks later, he flipped the script entirely by taking on INXS's arena monster Kick. Bringing in St. Vincent, Sérgio Dias of Os Mutantes, and the noise-rock trio Liars, they turned slick radio funk into twitchy, art-damaged post-punk.

3. 03

   The Acropolis Absurdity

   The final stand in 2010 was the absolute high-water mark of Beck's deadpan curatorial humor: taking on Yanni Live at the Acropolis. Instead of laughing off the new-age cheese, he treated the source material like high art, bringing in Chicago post-rock royalty Tortoise and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore to dismantle it. The sprawling instrumental jams turned polished arena melodrama into skronking, ambient noise workouts. Once that bizarre marathon hit the internet, Beck killed the series quietly, walking away before the concept could turn into a brand.

Influences

• The Velvet Underground — Beck chose The Velvet Underground & Nico as the very first session for the project in June 2009. The entire aesthetic of Record Club—relying on crude directness, ragged dissonance, and unpolished takes—is directly lifted from the way Lou Reed and John Cale cut their debut at Scepter Studios in a matter of days.
• Leonard Cohen — Record Club tackled Cohen's 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen as its second project later in 2009. The deadpan vocal delivery, fingerpicked skeletons, and literary focus of the material served as the literal script for Beck and guest vocalists like Devendra Banhart to deconstruct.
• Alexander 'Skip' Spence — The project covered Spence's solitary 1969 solo record Oar in its entirety in early 2010. Spence's sprawling, loose, and mentally unraveling approach to country-folk laid the foundation for the ragged, off-the-cuff ensemble playing Beck and Wilco leaned into for the session.
• INXS — The fourth Record Club project tackled INXS's massive 1987 commercial blockbuster Kick front to back. The sharp, mechanical funk grooves and vocal hooks written by Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss gave the collective an unmistakably rigid pop grid to distort with noise-rock arrangements.
• Yanni — Beck closed out the series in 2010 by forcing noise and post-rock musicians to learn Yanni Live at the Acropolis in a single sitting. The massive, bombastic keyboard motifs and theatrical time signatures of the original record became the unlikely launchpad for freeform improvisation by Sonic Youth and Tortoise.