#148 The Best Album of 2000, Round 2, Match #83: Aimee Mann vs. Mirah
Hey folks,
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#15 Aimee Mann, BACHELOR NO. 2 (OR, THE LAST REMAINS OF THE DODO)
Listen on Spotify or YouTube (Skip tracks #3 & #7)
vs.
#79 Mirah, YOU THINK IT’S LIKE THIS BUT REALLY IT’S LIKE THIS
Listen on Spotify or YouTube
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email (kentmbeeson@hey.com) or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
Today we have a Designated Cheerleader for BACHELOR NO. 2 (OR, THE LAST REMAINS OF THE DODO) by @joshksky.bsky.social. Take it away!
When my friend Aaron invited me to see Aimee Mann at Largo, I was skeptical. “Isn’t she the… Christian?” No, dummy, that’s Amy Grant. I missed that show, and wouldn’t ever see her at Largo on Fairfax, though I got my chance after the legendary L.A. comedy-and-music hub picked up to La Cienega, shedding its notoriously bad minimum-order kitchen. But Magnolia (1999, 4th round loss to Sleater-Kinney) came out a few months later and Bachelor No. 2 (Or, The Last Remains of the Dodo) wasn't far behind, and I would never not know who Aimee Mann was again.
The storied interpretive key to Bachelor No. 2 is simple: Aimee Mann has been cast aside and treated poorly by the music industry, and she’s going to sing about it as she would about a lover who has left her jilted and ill-used. You can doubt the gimmick, but she executes it perfectly. No songs sacrifices any power for trying to carry both a story about the impossibility of making art or love. Here, early in a long of an era of unstoppable, empowered women of pop riffing on Express Yourself, Aimee offers her clearest messages of bruising and failure. (After Geffen didn’t hear a hit, she successfully self-released the album.) She sings in a disappointed, vulnerable register, as if excusing herself to a lonely woods. She’s no vocal diva — she leans into the weak parts of her register so you can hear where she breaks — and you can listen to the whole thing twice before it becomes apparent that, pace “Satellite,” she is in fact sticking around.
Some of my favorite songs ignore the central metaphor. “Red Vines” was a minor radio hit; it delivers the showbiz saga without the romantic double meaning. I don’t think anyone loves “Susan” as much as I do, but it’s about a love affair with a mad bomber (I like how “the smell of cordite” brings me back to “what a waste of gunpowder and sky” from 1993’s “4th of July” (from Whatever, lost to Afghan Whigs in Round 2). “Ghost World” doesn’t retell the story of Dan Clowes’ comic book (for that we have Terry Zwigoff), but does find the album’s spirit of disappointment and defeat in its teenage narrator, who knows she’s less likely to leave town or burn it down than just hang around.
This is not an album to rock out to, but Jon Brion neatly distills the colors of “rocking out” into the palette of his finely orchestrated chamber pop. Perfectly overdriven guitars drained of reverb serve the purpose that snaking clarinets would elsewhere, holding up Aimee’s laments in grand waltzes and oldies shuffles. (The 2020 remaster folds in the previously left out Magnolia songs and updates a few arrangements. I prefer the original sequence, but I suppose it makes sense.)
This Bachelor No 2 won’t promises you a good time. It’s indisputably the right choice. Vote Aimee Mann for Best Album of 2000!
Thanks, @joshksky.bsky.social!
As always, click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #31 Shellac, 1000 HURTS defeated #34 Primal Scream, XTRMNTR, 63-49.
Thanks everyone! Have a great weekend, and look for the Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter in a day or two! Although I haven’t written down the schedule yet, we will not have a match on Christmas, but probably will on Christmas Eve. (Same I think for New Year’s Day/New Year’s Eve.)
Kent