#195 The Best Album of 2000, Round 5, Match #121: OutKast vs. The Avalanches
Hey folks! We are now in Round 5! That means we have eight albums left, and we’re going to turn that into the Final Four. On your marks, get set, vote!
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#1 OutKast, STANKONIA
Listen on Spotify or YouTube
vs.
#9 The Avalanches, SINCE I LEFT YOU
Listen on Spotify (Disc 1) or YouTube (Tracks 1-18)
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.
We have a Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for SINCE I LEFT YOU, and it’s from @vtforestbull! Take it away!
Since the dawn of recorded music, there's been the persistent idea that you could take existing sounds, combine them in some novel or inventive way, and get entirely new forms of music. This is nothing less than the promise of alchemy. And like alchemy, it's an idea with a rich history of freaks, hustlers, oddball geniuses, duds, fizzes, and the occasional explosion. But a bunch of weirdos from Melbourne called the Avalanches released their first album SINCE I LEFT YOU, and it's the closest anyone has come to fulfilling that promise of transmutation. Fittingly, since they started life as give or take the Australian Beastie Boys, their idiom is hip-hop turntablism -- but their vocabulary is the entire wide world of recorded sound. Because the primary lesson of the Avalanches' sound is that they have zero respect for the concept of genre as any kind of limitation on the music they make -- if the sounds fit together, that's all you need. Any sample you can clear (a remarkable number of them, it turns out!) is fair game. So, while the album has pulses of hip-hop and disco running through it, SINCE I LEFT YOU is full of astonishing variety: "Frontier Psychiatrist" was ready-made for the Napster/mashup era, but songs like "A Different Feeling" and "Flight Tonight" are a kind of warped, luminous pop, and "Radio" is pretty much a full-blown house track. The latter part of the album is largely an extended reverie wherein your grandma's easy listening LPs get into the edibles and start weaving together a warm, woozy storyline about pleasure cruises from a distant, more glamorous era: joyful, but suffused with a pang of nostalgic longing. This is the mystery at the heart of the Avalanches' music: blending together disparate sounds from the most improbable sources, and yet creating a sound that is unmistakably theirs.
Thanks again, @vtforestbull!
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, #6 Sleater-Kinney, ALL HANDS ON THE BAD ONE defeated #11 Godspeed You! Black Emperor, LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN, 77-72-1.
Thanks once again for making this tournament a success!
Kent