Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#45 Basement Jaxx, ROOTY

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

Firvs.

#84 Sophie Ellis-Bextor, READ MY LIPS

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 for ROOTY, and it’s from @jim5et.bsky.social. Take it away, Jim!

I spent most of the '90s in Brighton, but real jobs meant my girlfriend & I had to move to Oxford, so we rented a little flat off the Cowley Road around the turn of the millennium. The first time we went back for the weekend was 7 July 2001. It was a blazing Saturday & we spent it seeing everyone we knew, very slowly drifting down to the beach because Fatboy Slim was playing a free set. We'd never really been Big Beat Boutique people but it was free and sunny and we felt too old at 28 to go driving around looking for the parties, and we had a great time. He dropped Where's Your Head At? about halfway through so it was the first thing I really heard from Rooty, with all my oldest friends, dancing on the beach watching the sun set over West Pier.

The rain started about half an hour out of Oxford the next day, and as we got out of the car, I heard Radiohead's homecoming show wafting through the grey drizzle from South Parks & realised we really, really needed to move back to the seaside.

I was going to hold off on this in case of a Rooty vs Amnesiac face off later, but just in case - vote Rooty! The whole record is sunshine on a beach!

Thanks, Jim!

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, #20 Bob Dylan, "LOVE AND THEFT" defeated #109 Wu-Tang Clan, IRON FLAG, 121-103-4.

Thanks,

Kent