from the Loser EP, Bong Load Records, 1994BALLOONS BITCHES!!! Back in the ‘90s, my friends and I always enjoyed helping out at those afterhours functions built primarily upon the idea of someone showing up with a 40 lb. tank of nitrous oxide; being people who possessed said tank and a functional connection at a racetrack south of the city who was well-versed in the fine art of water-filtering sulfur from the nitrous, we lucked into many random connections that proved enormously useful during those mad times. This is classic Beck---not the smooth Scientologist songwriter of today, but instead the bent & broke hitchhiker of yore, renowned slacker and couch-surfer extraordinaire; while I certainly respect his maturation in musical style (albeit, I definitely do not get his whacktarded choice of “religion”…frankly, I’m still kind of hoping it’s a big joke or something…), it’s the old school Beck that captured my postmodern heart, and it’s those light-hearted tunes which really tickle me pink. The studio banter in the middle of this track is hilarious (i.e. “…and I really don’t think that I know what, to do...”), as is the sonic metal coda which closes the track, but it’s Beck’s wordplay that never fails to have me laughing out loud, “…my friend picked me up about quarter past 5, we stopped and got some donuts and we took a little drive, we had a can of nitrous, we rolled the windows up, now we're breathin' deeply, breathin' deeply…we spent many years always tryin to get high, smokin' broken pencils and beatin' up kids (?!), talkin' to the devil and drinkin' a coke, now we're totally rockin', totally rockin'…there's a fume, in this truck, and I don't know if we're dead, or what, the fuck, or what, the fuck is going on…”
