Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#59 Beulah, THE COAST IS NEVER CLEAR

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#70 Destiny's Child, SURVIVOR

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 THE COAST IS NEVER CLEAR, and it’s from @toddgotmon.bsky.social. Take it away, Todd!

The summer between graduating high school and starting college is a pretty consequential one in life. Deciding how you are going to change, what you are going to like, what kind of people you are going to like, what you are going to let other people know that you like, it can all be a lot!

That summer I got an apartment with a couple friends that stayed local and went to the county community college instead of going away. It was here I first got access to high speed modem instead of the 56K I had living at home. I spent that summer downloading A LOT of music.

Beulah was probably the first cool indie band that I found on my own though all that downloading. I spent a lot of time listening to "Emma Blowgun's Last Stand" and "If We Can Land a Man on the Moon Then Surely I can Win Your Heart" from their standout second album When Your Heartstrings Break. I probably spent even more time telling other people how great that record was.

....and let me tell you, after 9/11, the day The Coast Is Never Clear came out, no one wanted to listen to jangly, sun-stained, odes to the Beach Boys, Zombies, and Monkees, with clever word play about the Magnetic Fields. We just wanted to get drunk and listen to the Strokes or be drunk and listen to Andrew WK.

I still did though. I put a "Good Band Is Easy to Kill' and 'Night Is Day Turned Inside Out' on SO MANY mixes. I wasn't the only one either, Josh Schwartz from the O.C. added "Gravity is Bringing Us Down" onto a soundtrack for the show. This probably added a few fans but Beulah was never cool in a world where cool seemed so important. It didn't matter if it was Seth Cohen recommending "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" or me imitating the horns at the start of "Silver Lining", Beulah never gained the reach they deserved.

Pavement can say they were the last band before the internet but I would argue that if Beulah's career started 5 years later their impact could still be felt more strongly. This is a great record that is sorely underrated relative to its merits. Please give it a listen, because as Beulah knows too well, A Good Band Is Easy to Kill.

Thank you, Todd!

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, #6 Radiohead, AMNESIAC defeated #123 Whiskeytown, PNEUMONIA, 175-30-4.

Thanks,

Kent