Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#61 Pulp, WE LOVE LIFE

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vs.

#68 Les Savy Fav, GO FORTH

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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 one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for GO FORTH, and it’s from @robbiebuffalo.bsky.social! Take it away, Robbie!

The first time I saw Les Savy Fav they were playing an event at my college right before finals in the winter of 2000. Most of the students were there to dance, drink, and maybe hook up later. Les Savy Fav were not the band to facilitate that. The band was playing tight, frenetic, sometimes danceable, post-punk music. Les Savy Fav had met at RISD and the guitarist, bassist, and drummer all looked the part. Then there was singer Tim Harrington, who looked like he had drunkenly wandered in from his work as an extra on a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It's hard to capture in words his performing style. He never stood still, careening around from the band to crowd, seemingly possessed the entire time. Meanwhile, the band carried on as if their singer hadn't moved from the mic stand. It was an incredible performance, especially given that 90% of the audience didn't know what to make of it or were completely uninterested in it. I bought a CD afterwards, but didn't feel like it captured the intensity (or general insanity) of what I had witnessed.

GO FORTH came out the next fall, and if it didn't fully capture Les Savy Fav's live show, it at least married their strongest set of songs to their best produced record to date (thanks to indie legend Phil Ek). The songs feature driving, chiming guitars, danceable basslines, and propulsive drumming. They are melodic and catchy, while almost never using a conventional verse/chorus/verse structure. But again, what makes the band stand out is Harrington. His lyrics are full of clever wordplay that is funny but also strangely profound. "Crawling Can Be Beatiful" captures the experience of these songs:

I for one am dazzled

I don't care if dazzled blind

Rapt, enraptured, captured

By every little thing I find

The first few songs on the album are the most upbeat, aggressive rock songs on the record. But whenever you start to expect something, the band changes it up, pivoting to the atmospheric funk of "The Slip" to "Daily Dares", which begins with several minutes of instrumental, dreamy guitar picking before exploding for the final minute (with again, some great Harrington lyrics):

Use sentiment like aloe

Use sentiment like mace

Use sentimental explanations

Of how we got to this place

"Adopduction" is weirdly what its song title suggests - a story of being kidnapped and then becoming a family with your kidnappers. Like so much on GO FORTH it is unexpected, sort of ridiculous, and strangely moving. The album closer "Bloom on Demand" is my favorite song on the record. It starts the way many other songs do here, with a jagged guitar riff and skittery bassline driving the song forward. But this time Harrington is a bit more restrained. "This giving in is wearing thin" he repeats over and over. The music builds to a long, melodic outro with keyboards washing over the rest of the music. Like many of my favorite album closers, it feels like the conclusion of a journey that the preceding 40 minutes have taken you on. GO FORTH doesn't really have a narrative to this journey. It's more of a mood that fits with how life often feels - frantic, confused, chaotic, absurd, funny, but ultimately very much worth being there for.

Thank you, Robbie!

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, #40 Aphex Twin, DRUKQS defeated #89 Muse, ORIGIN OF SYMMETRY, 114-86-5.

Thanks,

Kent