#25 The Best Album of 2000 Run-Off Tournament Match #8: The For Carnation or Phoenix?
Hey folks!
The seventh match of the Best Album of 2000 Run-Off has concluded and the winner is:
Crooked Fingers, CROOKED FINGERS
CROOKED FINGERS defeated 16 Horsepower’s SECRET SOUTH, 40-29. CROOKED FINGERS advances in the tournament and will be seen next up against either The For Carnation’s THE FOR CARNATION or Phoenix’s UNITED.
@bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social on Bluesky
CROOKED FINGERS defeats SECRET SOUTH, 40-29.
Speaking of which…
Time now for today’s match:
The For Carnation, THE FOR CARNATION vs Phoenix, UNITED
Click the link below to go to the Google Forms to vote. (Google sign-in required.) Please, if possible, give both albums a listen before voting. If you don’t have time for the entire album, listen to the first 2-3 tracks of each.
The Best Album of 2000 Run-Off Tournament Match #8: The For Carnation vs. Phoenix
Welcome to the Match #8 of the Best Album of 2000 Run-Off Tournament! Over the next few weeks, we will take 17 albums and choose one to enter into the upcoming Best Album of 2000 tournament. All of these albums missed being entered into the Best Album of 2000 Tournament by one vote. Matches will be held every Monday through Friday, with the final match scheduled for Monday, June 17th. Want to see the entire bracket? Go here: https://challonge.com/o7ze0ruy# Be sure to follow me on Bluesky (@be...
DESIGNATED CHEERLEADER
We have another Designated Cheerleader today! It’s for THE FOR CARNATION, and it’s by @nanette.bsky.social and it’s a delightful, nostalgic little anecdote. Please give it a read!
I love music, but not in the “analyzing every track and talking about guitar effects and production and the noises you can make with drums” kind of way. I don’t know shit about that kind of stuff, and as a former/recovering gifted child, I don’t enter the discourse if I don’t know shit, because that’s where failure lives and we don’t go in the direction of failure because that’s scary.
I love music because it provides the soundtrack for my day-to-day existence, and because it can evoke memories of a particular time and place. Someone else can talk about the musical merits of this band and this album; I’m sure there are many. I’m going to talk about where it fits into my life.
2000 was a weird year. I was 26 years old, and I had what would probably be called a quarterlife crisis. Relationships bloomed and imploded in spectacular ways, I got fired from a shitty job, and I had to figure out what to do with my life. I documented the minutiae of my life in a blog called Amplified to Rock that still lives on the internet. Parts of it are deeply embarrassing and parts of it are lovely and funny and bring back memories of being young and ridiculous. I was very involved in the Chicago indie rock scene at the time, and I met a lot of people through my blog, including one boyfriend who lasted for two or three months: Louisville Brian.
I was familiar with Slint because of course I was, how could you not be if you were in your mid-20s and fancied yourself a person who was into indie rock. But it was through Louisville Brian that I became familiar with all of the other various incestuous Louisville bands, including The For Carnation. These bands all shared personnel and they sound more or less alike to my untrained ear, but the sound was a sound that I enjoyed so I listened to a lot of that stuff.
I bought The For Carnation’s self-titled album on a trip to Reckless Records in December 2000. Brian was visiting for the weekend and we were hanging out with my friend Matt, who lived down the street from Reckless. Because I was just fired from my job, I had very little money, but I spent what I had on CDs. Used was preferable, and we happened to find a used copy of The For Carnation and I picked it up because former members of Slint were involved. We listened to it on the drive back to the suburbs and I really liked it.
My relationship with Louisville Brian ended after a catastrophically bad New Year’s Eve where he got super drunk and I had to drive his piece of shit car through the streets of Louisville while he gave me not-so-great directions. Quirks that I initially found charming–like the fact that he never took his socks off around me, leading me to wonder what precisely the fuck was wrong with his feet–became tiresome. At some point after that I realized that maybe this weird relationship wasn’t working and he realized it too and we broke up, which is thoroughly documented (much to my embarrassment). He went on to date a high school girl from New Hampshire that he met on MakeOutClub (which was like an emo pickup site, no relation to the excellent song by Unrest); my next partner was the person I married. (We met at a Guided by Voices show.)
Awkward breakup notwithstanding, I have vivid memories of listening to this album on my ruby iMac while mugging for my webcam and posting to my blog and having long late-night chats on AOL Instant Messenger. I checked the blog archives and couldn’t find any references to The For Carnation, but I was too busy joking around about things that were music-adjacent and making plans to meet people at shows and being my usual weird, irreverent self. But this is late 2000/early 2001 background music, and that was a fun time in my life and music is so closely tied to my memories that The For Carnation feels warmly nostalgic. So it has my vote.
Is it a great album? Not particularly. It’s fine! Certainly not the best of 2000 but I think it has its merits and it is worthy of your vote. Vote for it because you also find that music brings you back to a part of your life that you miss, or vote for it because you think they’re amazing musicians and something about their very specific guitar sound or the way they use effects or whatever is great, or vote for it because now you too are curious about what was going on with Louisville Brian’s weird feet. (I have theories and they’re all gruesome.)
MATCH #8
The For Carnation, THE FOR CARNATION
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1tNPikqGc63Qu4CVsRya6t?si=AxJ12B1XSey2Yaa5cyU_oA
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V404enPgXlE
Phoenix, UNITED
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5MBUL8d9FAYCCMrogOFX68?si=t1phiuZATUyjjGRpxFZmXg
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdbdikDCGTk
No Kent’s Korner today. Just don’t feel like it!