Beck - Mellow Gold (1994)

2.5 ★/5.0 - 5.9

Listening to Mellow Gold should remind you of this news story:

A Georgia man is accused of holding his wife and children captive in a trash-filled mobile home for three years, police said Wednesday. Raymond Daniel Thurmond, 36, was arrested after police got a call from a woman at a local shelter August 4. "She told me they had a mother and four kids and apparently they'd been kept at home and there was some abuse allegations and the dad wouldn't let them leave," Lavonia Police Lt. Missy Collins said. Thurmond, who has no criminal record, was charged with one count of rape, four counts of cruelty to children in the first degree and five counts of false imprisonment. Alma Medina, the property manager for the Beaver Creek mobile home park, had lived three doors away from the family for the past 2½ years. Medina said she put a note on Thurmond's door to pay the late rent by August 5. On August 6, after no rent was received, she sent her maintenance man to the 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom trailer. He opened the door and came straight back, she said. "I want you to see this with your own eyes," she recalled the maintenance worker saying to her. "You better wear some shoes and gloves or something." Medina went in the trailer and found piles of trash everywhere: 4, 5 or 6 feet high, she said. Medina shot a video of the trash inside the trailer, including Diet Mountain Dew bottles, board games, cigarette boxes, frozen pizza boxes and piles of human hair on the kitchen floor. "You cannot describe the smell," she said. "It was so strong it would knock you out." After Thurmond's arrest, the trailer was cleaned out, but yellow jackets swarmed around a Dumpster full of trash -- including a stroller, car seat and toys -- from the trailer. A horrible stench still lingers. Before the park's maintenance staff began cleaning, anthills were under a mattress in the master bedroom, maggots crept around the trailer and roaches roamed inside the fridge.
~ from update on cnn.com/crime, August 13'th, 2008.

Not enough people seem to point out how outright disturbing a lot of Beck's music is, but Mellow Gold is probably where it was most obvious. Unique and fascinating, yet undoubtedly repulsive.