What’s weird about the fact that Beck has so many albums that could be argued to be his best is that he also has a handful of iconic ones that represent very dissimilar points in his career in terms of style, persona, and quality; out of any of them, Mellow Gold might be the most iconic of a specific era and the one that feels most distant from where his career would progress. Even if it has sounds of most of what would follow, the fact that “Loser” blew up like it did, and that Beck became associated with symbols of the ’90s slacker imagery and ironic mindset, makes it feel like a relic of a particular era and a particular version of Beck that didn’t ever quite exist again to this extent. Your allegiance to Mellow Gold probably varies on to what degree you prefer your Beck sardonic, scuzzy, and still sorta lo-fi. To that end, there are two things that weaken Mellow Gold as time passes. The first is that parts of this just haven’t really aged well. It feels like that document of a specific time, but not necessarily the type that still feels very vital when you listen to it today. That feeds into the second hindrance: while Beck’s aesthetic and lyrical hijinks flowered here and established what he was all about, the songs aren’t always on the same level as say, the material that traversed similar territory on an album like Odelay. No question, “Loser” is a ’90s classic and there’s the gorgeous “Blackhole” or the weird charms of “Beercan,” but a lot of the mucky, snarky experimentalism of Beck’s earliest work is still present here. There are plenty of Beck fans for whom Mellow Gold is the start of it all, one of the man’s classics — and, yes, it’s an important step in his career, but more and more I can’t help but hear it as more of a transitional record between those early Beck days and the heights that he’d reach in subsequent years.