band in the past year with the balls– or lack of sense, your call– to release a debut album as overgrown with ideas (not always good ones, mind you) as The Beta Band." Stuart Berman, also of Pitchfork, described The Beta Band as the group's most notorious release and felt it was the last known example of a "group this strange" signing to a major label and then using their new label to make even stranger music, especially when considering the abandoned ambient bonus disc. "If the record violently vascillates between fascinating and frustrating on a song-by-song basis," he said, "its over-arching oddness retains its own peculiar allure." Derek Miller of Stylus Magazine said that by the time the band split up in 2004, The Beta Band was widely considered to be "unnecessarily difficult, a short side-step in the career of a remarkably talented band", but he felt the album had been long underrated and was due for re-evaluation, praising its unique sound and adding that it "remains the broken-toothed step-child with a little bit of dander on the lip and a tangle of hair on its back, but Christ those eyes, so keen and full of mischief, forgive the ugly parts." Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber called The Beta Band "the greatest acid-burnt full-length of the late 90s", saying that although it "took some getting used to, since half of its songs were, to put it gently, cracked", the "densely layered electronic psychedelia" songs proved the band as "one of the few modern electronic-based bands capable of successfully splicing hundreds of self-created sources into huge, pastoral symphonies, grounded in both pop music and Dalí surrealism." The album is featured in Mojo magazine's book The Mojo Collection, which lists what its authors consider to be the 1,000 greatest albums of all time. Track listing All tracks written by The Beta Band. "The Beta Band Rap" – 4:41 "It's Not Too Beautiful" – 8:29 "Simple Boy" – 2:18 "Round the Bend" – 4:56 "Dance O'er the Border" – 5:33 "Brokenupadingdong" – 4:46 "Number 15" – 6:49 "Smiling" – 8:35 "The Hard One" – 10:06 "The Cow's Wrong" – 5:49 Personnel Adapted from the liner notes of The Beta Band Steve Mason - vocals Richard Greentree – bass Robin Jones – drums Chris Allison – producer, recorder John Maclean – sampler, turntables Fergus Percell – human beatbox (track 5) Kingsley – vocals (track