Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#29 Built to Spill, ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE

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vs.

#36 The Microphones, THE GLOW PT. 2

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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.

Today, I’m seein’ double: four Designated Cheerleaders! And it’s evenly split, as well. First up, for ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE, we have the tag team of @mrfasthorse.bsky.social and @bsglaser.bsky.social. First up, it’s @mrfasthorse.bsky.social. Take it away, Stephen!

This is the fifth studio album from this indie alt rock mainstay, living in the afterglow of seminal studio albums Perfect from Now On and Keep It Like a Secret. This album is a step back to the looser feel of BTS’s earlier work, but a step toward the keyboards and synths that makes AMOTF unique in the BTS catalogue. It’s a maturing sound, a recurring motif of many bands in this bracket that were trying to find a way to survive in transition from the grunge & alt-rock explosion of the 90’s into a sound befitting musicians approaching their (gulp) thirties.

BTS has long been an indie band shibboleth, name-checked by bands like Modest Mouse, and even by the likes of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, and covered once by Ben Folds Five (Twin Falls, a beautifully melancholy song in both original form and in the cover). Trimmed and Burning on AMOTF is more reminiscent of the band’s earlier indie sound - think a little more Steve Albini than Butch Vig. Now, in their old age, there’s a touch of country creeping into the song arrangements. On AMOTF, Happiness is a sloppy cowboy campfire romp, and Fly around My Pretty Little Miss is a fun poppy continuation of this country flavor. There’s long been a country twang buried in BTS, and frontman Doug Martsch toured solo with Modest Mouse just last year, as a country act playing slide guitar.

The synth on this record was a new divisive element for BTS, providing a sonic backdrop that would be difficult to achieve with guitars & pedals alone. The sad sagging synth in the verses of Alarmed are challenging at first, but they give way to a marching triumphal chorus and a cyclic guitar-fuzz bridge. To me the synths don’t feel out of place. It’s a piece of their evolving sound, an experiment reaching its peak here before scaling back in subsequent releases (I hesitate to compare the novelty to that blasted tremolo on REMs Monster, but alas).

Right as I started grad school, I made new friends that were really into Built to Spill, who handed me a copy of Perfect from Now On. I’ll confess it didn’t impress me at first, but I went along with them to a local BTS show anyway, trying to nurture these new friendships in an unfamiliar town. I remember it was on a brief tour of small venues leading up to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, where BTS were tuning up for a show where they were to play Perfect from start to finish. Reader, the way that this band clicked for me in the very first song that night (Randy Described Eternity) is something I wish everyone could experience, and years later I still can’t quite put my finger on exactly why it hit so hard. Martsch’s shy minimalist banter combined with his Muppet-like singing mannerisms and melodic extended solos were somehow the Rosetta Stone I needed to go back through their entire discography and really get it. Listening to AMOTF straight through for the first time in a while, I was surprised how many songs felt timeless and inevitable, like if Martsch didn’t write them someone else would.

As a perpetually touring indie act, I’ve seen BTS live maybe a dozen times now, with three different configurations backing Martsch, the only constant in the group. With his signature dirty pants and touring backpack carried right on stage, he’s now an ascetic monk worshiping small venues. I have tickets for another show this fall. I hope they play Strange.

Thank you, Stephen!

Now his tag team partner, @bsglaser.bsky.social. Take it away, Brian!

This will be a shortie, but I just wanted to share that I really like this album, despite having one of the biggest bummer experiences seeing Built to Spill on the ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE tour.

(The Original) BTS landed at Irving Plaza in NYC on Sept. 21, 2001, and, well, let's just say at that point you could still smell the smoke and other stuff up on 15th Street. But I think a lot of people really appreciated that bands were still showing up to play, despite how awkward it would be to throw out even the most bog-standard stage patter: "How's it going NEW YORK CITYYYYYY?!?" The shows I saw in Sept & Oct really helped.

BTS brought the big guitar-rock heat, and the setlist was filled with some of their best tunes. They opened with the Halo Benders' excellent "Virginia Reel Around the Fountain," delivered "Car" and "Twin Falls" and "Joyride" and even "Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup." Did they have a cover of "Dream Police" ready to go? They did! Thank you!

Then, at the end of the set, I swear to you on a stack of Trouser Press Record Guides that Doug and crew played "Free Bird." No one ironically yelled for it, they just played it. At length, with tons of extended guitar solos. And the lighting guy at Irving Plaza...he brought down the lights and shone a spotlight on the American Flag that was to the left of the stage. I am not making this up. I mean, come ON. This was NOT WHAT WE WERE HERE FOR. I guess some people maybe appreciated it, but to me it was such a fucking bummer. Can't we just rock out for a couple of hours? Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, AMOTF feels to me like the end of a kind of trilogy with PERFECT FROM NOW ON and KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET. The songs are tight and twisty and melodic and doused in that good BTS guitar stuff. I'd been listening to it all summer and enjoyed it. But it's now the BTS record I put on least often, just because it makes me remember "Free Bird" and that damn spotlight.

Thank you, Brian!

In the other corner, for THE GLOW PT. 2, it’s the team of @wormsgreenrealm.bsky.social and @puntrash.bsky.social. First up, it’s @wormsgreenrealm.bsky.social. 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!

Now tagging in, it’s @puntrash.bsky.social. Take it away, Jakob!

I have started and deleted this DC piece several times because I don’t know how to properly write about this album, one that has meant the world to me ever since I was 19 years old. It’s strange to say out loud how this album about self-isolation after heartbreak is difficult to write about, but talking about the music of Phil Elverum in the context of my life feels like talking about the first time I felt like I grew up. I was living in North Carolina, several states away from home, in college, and my surroundings were all mountainous. It was often foggy during the fall and spring, and so his lyrics over lo-fi folk instrumentals felt like I was often living through what he was singing about, even though his art was so deeply Pacific Northwest. While The Glow Pt. 2 was not my first foray into Phil’s work, it was when I realized that I loved the notion of albums that are trying to do so much with so little. Phil was inspired by albums like Pet Sounds and films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and wanted to make something that felt cinematic and rich. He only had limited tools and didn’t have glossy production, but the record has that richness due to different sounds and instruments that come forth. The horns, the bells, the steel drums, the guitar distortion, the thumping piano, these instruments have their own identities and sound massive. I would walk through the woods near my school and take pictures while listening to the album because it fit the setting magically. The record sounded like a withering tree, early morning mist on the ground, and those would be the subjects of my pictures as I blared this album through my headphones. I wanted these pictures to match the feelings that I had while I listened to the album. I wanted to capture something rooted in the reality surrounding me, but also heightened with emotion. I wanted these photos to feel like The Glow Pt. 2.

The Glow Pt. 2 became a comfort album for me during the summer of 2018, when I was going through a job stiffing me of pay, continued existential dread caused by the worsening state of the world, and terrible feelings after a break-up. I listened to that, They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln, and Paramore’s After Laughter every day as I was dreading going back to school and seeing my ex again. Lincoln felt like embracing absurdity in order to stay sane, After Laughter felt like keeping a smile on while trying not to burden anyone with problems, and The Glow Pt. 2 was the sound of trying to make new memories but failing, which is what my favorite song on the album “The Moon” was about (“I went back to feel alone there / I went back there by myself / And gave up on everything that we had felt”). Listening to these lyrics when you are 19 and heartbroken is like watching a film in 4DX, suddenly you understand it in new ways that you didn’t think were possible. The breakup album comes in many forms: regretful, vengeful, nostalgic, but ultimately heartbroken. The narrative this record follows is that it is about someone who goes through a bad relationship and feels the need to self-exile into the woods, away from anyone and everyone, but the lack of community ends up killing him. (Depending on who you ask, the album ends with him getting mauled by a bear.) And I didn’t get that message at the time, as someone who was isolated and wanted to isolate, this album was soothing. I wanted to constantly live in the depression that this character was feeling. I wanted to call those noisy black metal-adjacent guitar crunches that followed those wistful acoustic guitar licks my home. I was deeply sad and deeply regretful and this album was my wallowing.

Now? I listen to The Glow Pt. 2 and I feel nothing but joy. This record brings me comfort and even listening to its sadder songs gives me a sense of bliss. While The Microphones is led by Phil Elverum, they are a collective of musicians, and you hear a bunch of Washington hippies staying up all night in the recording studio wanting to make something ambitious and weird. Despite the record referencing death, vulnerability, and depression, life is all around the record, in every note, in every voice crack, in every drum hit, in every lyric. To feel these feelings, to express them in art, to convey them with grandiosity and fucked guitars is a beauty that I can’t describe. That’s why I continue to come back to The Glow Pt. 2, why it’s still my favorite album, even when Phil would only improve as a musician and songwriter. I discovered it at the right time, it comforted me during the worst parts of my life, and it helped me realize what I wanted from great art. The messiness, the humanity, and using the limited tools you have to make something unique.

Thank you, Jakob!

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Yesterday, #4 Daft Punk, DISCOVERY defeated #61 Pulp, WE LOVE LIFE, 138-69-1.

Thanks,

Kent