Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#36 The Microphones, THE GLOW PT. 2

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#93 Elbow, ASLEEP IN THE BACK

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.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s from @wormsgreenrealm.bsky.social and it’s for THE GLOW PT. 2. Take it away, Rob!

Phil Elverum wants you to truly believe that everything in the world exists. In one of his best songs (one of the best songs ever written for my money) "Through the Trees Pt. 2" from Mount Eerie's Clear Moon, he wrote: "I know there's no other world / mountains, and websites." This has stuck with me and ever since has informed the way I hear every single project he works on. Water, wind, and the vast expanse of sky are all over his work; they are the blankets, the tapestries, that encapsulate this all-encompassing worldview. Look up at the moon in the right atmosphere and mindset and you will palpably feel your connection with its vastness.

He comes from an experimental, lo-fi, and DIY milieu; these are spaces I respect but am no expert on, and so I can't speak as well as others on how he synthesizes these influences in his work, but I can say that it's evident his approach to aesthetics and sonics is the same as his overall metaphysic: anything and everything goes. This means blown out percussion and vocals live side by side with the crisp clarity of acoustic guitar. Synthesizer is as likely to emerge through walls of noise as horns or a startlingly beautiful vocal harmony. Creaky chairs and floors and tables become their own forms of percussion, blowing wind an ambient curtain. Instrumental fragments accompany fleshed out, sometimes sprawling songs. Raw, aggressive instrumentation suddenly gives way to psych-folk ramblings. Repetition and accumulation are tools he has stuck with over the years, and this quality--which can be as alienating and obscure as it is meditative and hypnotic--is all over The Glow, Pt. 2.

Also, a fixation on the tactile, the phenomenological experiences of the everyday. "You'll Be in the Air" is laced with bizarre, sensual lyricism of the sort only someone who contains the multitudes of "psych-folkie" and "drum machine aficionado" could, e.g.:

"If you just moved your arms
Then you could tell that you are in the air
You'd feel the yawning gulf grow wider
And you'd feel the dwindling fuel for your lungs
And your breaths would slow
You'd be in the air
You'd feel the hot blowing rock filled winds
And the clouds of ash would fill your skies
And you smoothly glide
Over the cold river basin where we spend the night"

All the while a recurring notion: "There's no end."

The Glow Pt. 2 has never been even close to my favorite Elverum album, in part because I appreciate the more considered and built out sound of his work under the Mount Eerie moniker. One of the most fascinating aspects of Phil Elverum's career is how recent work reconsiders and bleeds back into his older work; aging, mortality, parenthood, and more mundane practical matters have taken center stage in his lyrical content over the past decade and make the more obtuse and young adult pretensions of the early Microphones work more forgivable, like looking back on a college essay with simultaneous embarrassment and pride. His gestures toward endlessness and emptiness and voids and vast expanses of being etc. are, now, placed in stark contrast with the matters of toothbrushes, trash cans, rocks, pumpkins, phone calls, commutes. His earlier interests were by necessity the interests of unlearned youth. The Glow Pt. 2 then is the perfect exemplar of youthful, experimental exuberance; a prologue, not a pinnacle.

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, #29 Built to Spill, ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE defeated #100 Mercury Rev, ALL IS DREAM, 125-66-2.

Thanks,

Kent