Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#25 Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#104 Converge, JANE DOE

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 dueling Designated Cheerleaders! First up, for THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE, we have @alex-mitrani.bsky.social. The following was originally posted here and is reprinted in this newsletter by permission. Be sure to check out the link for a complete list of the references. Okay, take it away, Alex!

This is going to be short and sweet because I only started listening to Tyranny of Distance this year, although I may have heard several of the songs earlier on live recordings. I like it a lot and it’s grown on me a bit with each repeat listen. Plenty of good tunes that rock intensely without being abrasive or crushing. Some of the guitar lines, while being totally electric and rocking, bring to my mind more traditional instrumentation like bagpipes and fiddles, there’s something folky about them.

The album title comes from a line in the song ‘Six Months in a Leaky Boat’ by Split Enz, a song which Ted Leo has covered twice, which itself references a history book called ‘the tyranny of distance (how distance shaped Australia’s history)’ (Blainey 1966).

The tyranny of distance

Didn’t stop the cavalier

So why should it stop me?

I’ll conquer and stay free (Split Enz 1982)

Lyrical themes are varied, several seem to have nautical themes as does the cover art, and some of them go quite deep. Some images appear in several songs, for instance ‘parallel run streams’ in biomusicology is followed by ‘parallel or together’ which makes me think of the lines of longitude which run parallel but converge at the poles. ‘Dial Up’ discusses over twenty years of history and the influence of british punk band Crass. Their independent way of living and working inspired many others, and they lived at a place called Dial House which was under threat of eviction at the time the music for this album was being written (Aitch 2001).

The Tyranny of Distance was recorded February 17 - March 3, 2001 and it was released in June 2001 (Ted Leo / Pharmacists 2001). All songs written by Ted Leo who sings and plays guitar. The Pharmacists on this record included no less than 4 different drummers (James Canty, Brendan Canty, Seb Thomson and Danny Leo), James Canty (Nation of Ulysses, Make Up) on second guitar, Alex Minoff and Pete Kerlin on bass, plus Amy Dominguez on cello (who also played cello on Fugazi’s The Argument a month or so earlier). Production was by Brendan Canty (Fugazi) and the recording engineer was Seb Thomson (Trans Am).

There’s a very good article on the making of this record by John Vettesse that is recommended reading for further information (Vettese 2016).

There is a collection of live recordings by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (approved by the band) on the Internet Archive (Leo and Pharmacists 2024). The show at Brownies in New York City on 2001-09-02 is a good recording that includes live renditions of 9 of the 12 songs from Tyranny of Distance (Leo and Pharmacists 2001).

Have a listen, it’s worth at least 48 minutes and 54 seconds of your time.

Thank you, Alex!

Second up to bat, for JANE DOE, it’s @chaosgoblinlc.bsky.social. Take it away, Chaos Goblin Line Cook!

I played in a metal band with my friends that never left the suburbs and exurbs of Philly in our 15 years playing together. I had touchstones in metal and hardcore that came and went, and didn’t encounter Converge until 2010 or so after graduating college when I started branching out from heavier bands that weren’t exclusively on Tooth & Nail or Solid State Records (was my band painfully Christian? Yes, don’t judge).

The first time I heard Jane Doe was as Sputnikmusic’s #1 album of the decade, and I was immediately hooked. I was going through the anthropology of early metalcore from that era, and while it doesn’t occupy the all-timer status for me that Cave In’s “Jupiter” does, nor hold as strong an affinity for Botch’s “We Are The Romans”, Jane Doe and Converge itself has the strongest discography and cultural longevity from this record onwards and it isn’t even close.

There are a bunch of stars on this record: Kurt Ballou was still nascent in his production career, and his production overall makes the whole thing sound like a jet engine, even in its slower moments that are more akin to The Jesus Lizard or Neurosis than their typical contemporary stalking grounds of 90s hardcore and South of Heaven-era Slayer. Processing Jacob Bannon’s vocals into a primordial, almost inhuman expression of sadness and anger opened the lane for so many cool production ideas for so many bands that wanted that similar otherworldly quality. And the rhythm section? Nate Newton’s tone is among my favorite of any bassist, and Ben Koller is one of those guys where you can’t help but find the fills and acrobatics simply unreal (and unlike Mario Duplantier, doesn’t have to publish a workout regimen to play the way he does).

It almost feels trite to talk about individual tracks; it has its softer moments, but it’s hard to qualify what is and isn’t a sonic assault on a record that’s constantly goading you into either rushing into a bunch of other sweaty, agitated bodies or shutting it off altogether. If you listen to Concubine, and decide it isn’t for you, I can’t even begrudge you of that; it’s genuinely transgressive music birthed in a world where Fred Durst was play-acting on center stage pretending to know what that actually sounds and looks like.

Admittedly, I’m not a big Ted Leo guy. He’s a legend in the DC scene not too far from me, and his songwriting/guitar chops are highly underrated, and I can recognize that. But Jane Doe is an engineering and genre achievement for it’s time that deserves to move forward in this tournament (if it does at all).

Thank you, Johnny!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Thanks,

Kent