Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#40 Aphex Twin, DRUKQS

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vs.

#89 Muse, ORIGIN OF SYMMETRY

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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 dueling Designated Cheerleaders today! First up, it’s @locraen.bsky.social and it’s for DRUKQS! Take it away, argle-bargle!

Who is Drukqs for, exactly?

Before we can speculate, we have to begin with some facts, or at least what passes for "facts" from a narrator as notoriously unreliable as Richard D. James:

1. Sometime around April or May 2001, Mr. James was on a flight to Scotland.

2. In his possession was an mp3 player containing 282 unreleased Aphex Twin tracks and another
80 unreleased Squarepusher tracks.

3. He left the mp3 player on the plane, and it was never seen or heard again, even though he had written "Aphex Twin-_Unreleased Tracks" on it.

4. Drukqs, which was comprised of 30 of those 282 tracks, was mastered in July and released on October 22.

And that's it. Those are all the facts. At least, those are what we are going to have to accept as facts until we know better. Let's move into speculation.

Mr. James claims that Drukqs was rushed to release because of a concern that tracks from the missing mp3 would start popping up on the internet. The timeline of events above gives some credence to this claim. To a degree, so does the content and structure of the album itself. If you are not paying attention, the album can seem a bit disjointed and haphazard, "kind of like an mp3 album, really,” as Mr. James himself concedes.

So perhaps Drukqs is for Mr. James's bank accounts. He has certainly joked/not joked(?) about it being all about the money. But that's obviously not correct. A person doing it for the money wouldn’t release an album nearly half-filled with short pieces for prepared piano. No one can dance to that!

[Before we go any further, I'd encourage you to go put the album on right now if you haven't already. Go ahead. We'll wait. Start anywhere. Hit shuffle. It doesn’t really matter. And don't be intimidated by the 101-minute run time! It's ok if you don't listen to the whole thing, or even half of it. If one of the tracks or movements isn't working for you, skip to the next one. "You could listen to all of it in one go, but I think you'd be dead if you did," Mr. James admits. That said, I have done so many times and I’m still breathing, I think. Ok, you're listening now? Onward then.]

But the so-called rushed production, the disjointed structure, and the lack of boundary-pushing material could hint at something else. There was a lot of speculation in 2001 that Mr. James was pretty clearly over working with Warp Records, and that Mr. James —specifically operating under the Aphex Twin moniker — had released five of the six albums that he was contractually obligated to release with the label.

So perhaps Drukqs is for the record label. And it is, but it also isn't, at least not to end a contract.
Aphex Twin went on to release nine EPs and an additional album on Warp.

Drukqs wasn't for the critics; that much we can say with some degree of certainty. It's a sprawling, kind of mishmash of a double LP spanning territories that had been well-explored before, which annoyed most contemporary musick reviewers. What have you done for me lately, Aphex Twin? Given that it had been four years since he'd released anything under the Aphex Twin name--the Come to Daddy EP--it's hard to give them too much grief for expecting some exciting! new! sound! After all, it's what Aphex Twin had provided up to that point. There are ambient adjacent pieces, like "Gwely Mernans” or "Bbydhyonchord" that would've felt right at home on Selected Ambient Works, Volume II, for example. There are some bare-bones drum 'n' bass tracks like "Gwarek2.” which is almost like a noise collage. There are jungle and drill 'n' bass tracks like "Omgyjya-Switch 7," or the masterful "Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount,” which was well-worn territory for Aphex Twin, especially on 1996’s Richard D. James Album.

And of course, there are the many pieces recorded on a Disklavier piano that was prepared with "screws and nails and bits of rubber," to which Mr. James concedes were influenced John Cage and Erik Satie, the latter of whom was his favorite piano composer. Although "Hy a Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow is my favorite of these, the most ubiquitous, of course, is "Avril 14," which is one of the two or three most streamed songs in all of Richard D. James's catalogue, likely to his chagrin. (Oddly, April 14 features prominently on another album from 2001 Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) — in which it is referred to as "Ruination Day." One wonders whether it may have been the very day that Mr. James took that fateful flight to Scotland. At the very least, it's a strange coincidence!).

So, no, Drukqs is not breaking new ground. Mr. James opined that the tracks don't really sound new, "style-wise," but they are new "depth-wise." "I haven't done something in so much detail before. There's about a hundred times more details than in older ones." If you’ve been listening to the album on a set of good headphones, then you probably already know this to be true. Drukqs is something of a culmination of everything that Aphex Twin had released before, but done better and more maximalist. Most days I would even say that it's my favorite Aphex Twin album for those very reasons (other days it's 2014's Syro, but that's still a long ways away from here. There is just so much there; I dare say Drukqs has at least a lil something for everyone. Let it wash over you, and I can almost guaranty that you'll find some tracks to like.

So. Who is Drukqs for, exactly?

All of us, of course!

Thank you, argle-bargle!

Next up, for ORIGIN OF SYMMETRY, it’s @wormsgreenrealm.bsky.social. Take it away, Rob!

The modus operandi of Origin of Symmetry is clear from the banger opening track “New Born,” the first Muse song I ever clocked and still one of my favorites. Arpeggiating pianos and hints of soft percussion gradually accumulate as Muse frontman Matt Bellamy croons semi-incoherent nothings, his Thom Yorke-ian falsetto emerging as the prologue crescendos and his trudging machine gun guitar takes over for the rest of the duration.

Muse have been accused of ripping off Radiohead in their paranoiac, tech-y version of britpop, but they’re only a couple years younger and far more indebted to the carnivalesque glam rock that also informed the emo-tinged pop-punk soon to come. They have the placeless bozo politics of Roger Waters and soap operatics of Freddie Mercury with a muscular neo-prog prowess; this makes for a sometimes bizarre sonic experience, especially as their career went on, but Origin of Symmetry is rich with songs focused on symphonic rather than conventional verse-chorus-verse structures. Every song becomes a journey; e.g. perhaps the best song and centerpiece of the album, “Citizen Erased,” initially thrashes with a Tom Morello-esque riff, gives way to tempered verses cut with this harsher sound, and finally concludes with a soft, piano-centric epilogue.

The album’s holistic experience follows suit, moving fluidly from love songs with lunkheaded turn of the century sci-fi metaphors (“Space Dementia,” “Plug In Baby”) to more political work they’d expand on considerably in future albums (“Megalomania”).

Is it their crowning achievement? I’m more partial to Black Holes & Revelations, and Absolution has proven to carry more popular appeal, but Origins of Symmetry is undoubtedly a strong thesis statement for the band’s consistent and appealing pop-forward prog.

Thank you, Rob!

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, #41 Sparklehorse, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE defeated #88 Pernice Brothers, THE WORLD WON'T END, 99-63-3.

Thanks,

Kent