#152 The Best Album of 2000, Round 2, Match #86: Clinic vs. The Dandy Warhols
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#26 Clinic, INTERNAL WRANGLER
Listen on Spotify or YouTube
vs.
#39 The Dandy Warhols, THIRTEEN TALES FROM URBAN BOHEMIA
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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 for THIRTEEN TALES FROM URBAN BOHEMIA, and it’s from @megabrow12.bsky.social. Take it away!
WARNING: This DC contains generalisations which can be disproved with single examples from your much more extensive music knowledge.
Between somewhere around the mid-90s to 2010 every band’s best album was their debut album.
(see, you were warned).
This wasn’t always true – 80’s bands got several albums to get good at making albums. Even beloved bands like The Cure were rubbish at lyrics for ages (No. Shut up. You were warned). Then somewhere around the mid-1990s as the Britpop & grunge sales tailed off, record companies got all coy about chucking record contracts at anyone who sounded a bit like The Kinks or could do a load of slow bit/loud bit songs.
Hence if an album was to be put out by a new band it had to be good. Most of my favourite albums from the period are debuts. I assume this is because of capitalism (boo!) and wanting to actually make some money before the end of $15 CDs. By the 2010s the world was changed and anyone can self-release and potentially find their own audience. But for a roughly 15 year period a lot of quality control went into debut albums. If a debut didn’t sell there often wasn’t a second. If it did, the second was supposed to sound a lot like the commercially successful first. I do not claim this is a good thing, it just is.
Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia is one of the few exceptions to this. It’s their 3rd album and second on a major label. The previous album was full of tripped out guitars and what a proper music writer might call slow burn space rock. And it was great, but mostly 1 note – even the singles.
Thirteen Tales starts out the same way – the first 3 tracks could be from The Dandy Warhols Come Down – and then it changes. Here’s a country song about insufferable gap year wankers. Here’s a little ditty about drugged out divorcees. Here’s some actual pop songs. Oh and here is Bohemian Like You – that ended up becoming massive the UK. I think, first picked up as the intro theme to the football scores on BBC radio, then a Vodaphone advert, then everywhere else. If you asked me to pick an album where a band took what they had done before, kept it as still unarguably ‘their sound’ but also evolved it, made it more, made it better – this is the album I’d point you to (unless you’re a millennial in which is case it’s Too Much To Ask by Cheekface).
It's an album I come back to regularly – and even if I’m not listening to it, any time I’m wandering around with one of those hangovers which properly fugue your brain I am aways – ALWAYS – playing the line
“Well it’s a brand new day and I’m walking round old town
I feel as cool as shit cos I’ve got no thoughts keeping me down”Thanks – have a great day!
You too, @megabrow12!
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, #7 Modest Mouse, THE MOON & ANTARCTICA defeated #71 Sunny Day Real Estate, THE RISING TIDE, 72-20.
Thanks everyone, and hope you all have a great 2025.
Kent