Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#28 Andrew W.K., I GET WET

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vs.

#37 Röyksopp, MELODY A.M.

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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 dueling Designated Cheerleaders today! First up, for I GET WET, it’s… it’s me! Take it away, me!

This is the day I've been looking forward to ever since I announced the Best Album of 2001 tournament.

Every once in a while, an album comes along that changes everything for me. It's fortunate if you get one album in a given year that becomes both a cultural touchstone and a musical best friend, something that you return to year after year, and know other people do the same.

Well, today I'm talking about three revolutionary albums of this type, all from 2001. The first one is a metal album that induces instant adrenaline from the first note, one that uses guitars to summon anarchic, destructive energy. The second one is a techno album, with a 4/4 beat like a runaway locomotive, and like the best techo albums, can make the listener feel like they could merge their heart with that of the universe. And the third is a Broadway musical soundtrack, infused with singalong melodies whose power can unite an audience into one soaring spirit.

So, three records: a metal album full of adrenaline; a techno album that grabs the heart; and a Broadway musical soundtrack that lifts the spirit. A metal album, a techno album, and a Broadway musical soundtrack. A metal album, a techno album… are you getting it? These are not three separate albums, this is one album, and it's called I GET WET. Today, I'm going to make my case with a Designated Cheerleader, and here it is.

===

Okay Steve Jobs, how serious are you about this? That should be an easy question to answer, but it isn't, really. That's appropriate, since the first time I encountered Andrew W.K. was the video for "Party Hard," and after watching this greasy-looking guy in white jeans headbang while hitting a single key on a piano, I was entirely unsure how serious he was. Sincerity? Irony? Post-irony? What the fuck is post-irony, isn't that just sincerity? I honestly couldn't tell where he was coming from, so I couldn't use that to triangulate my intellectual response. Fortunately, my gut response told my intellectual response to fuck right off. I wanted to hear it again, and again, and again.

Soon after, I went to the record store (long, 54 year old sigh) and bought the "Party Hard" import single, and then not long after, I had my friend have another friend, who was visiting from the U.K., get me the full album, which had been released in that country months prior to its U.S. release. (I don't think that friend-of-a-friend liked me much. Wait, did I ever pay anyone back for that album? Oh no.) From that point on, I GET WET  has been in continuous rotation, in my CD player or on my computer, for twenty-five years.

But why, though? Yes, I think it's great, but what is it about this album? Or put another way: how serious am I about this?

===

Music has the ability to take us out of ourselves, to momentarily free us from our ego and physical existence, and potentially connect us to something greater. All music is capable of that, but I think metal, techno, and Broadway musicals (or at least those showtunes where the cast comes together to belt out a showstopper) are genres that have been sharpened to a point and geared to deliver that experience.

What W.K., ever the hedonist, asks is: Why not all three, all at the same time?

This should not wrk. You can combine two of those, but adding the third should topple the whole thing over, a musical version of the froyo toppings bar syndrome. But it does work. How?

It helps that there's generally nothing subtle about metal, techno, or Broadway musicals. All three want to grab you by the metaphorical lapels and drag you somewhere, no listener left behind. That lack of subtlety is the binding element. (And I suspect one of people's big knocks against I GET WET. ) Everything is cranked to 11. Not only are there no slow songs, I'm not sure there's anything that can be described as medium tempo. It's constant Go Go Go, a musical speedball of caffeine, nicotine and cocaine (Oops! All Stimulants). It's 36 minutes of getting caught in an Andy Capp dust cloud brawl, or being curled up in a ball inside a bouncy castle as first graders jump on you.

But there's more going on here than simple Neanderthal obviousness. Neanderthal obviousness is pretty common. (Pretty cool, but pretty common.) Less common is machine-tooled Neanderthal obviousness.

I've used this comparison before, so forgive me if you've read it already, but: sometime ago, a rock critic (possibly Chuck Eddy but I don't recall who) once described The Strokes as five guys trying to sound like one guy, and The White Stripes as two people trying to sound like a hundred. On I GET WET, W.K. is one dude trying to sound like a thousand. I'm not knowledgeable enough about studio recording to full understand it all, but it sounds like nearly everything, but especially the guitars and W.K.'s voice, are overdubbed to the max, layers and layers and layers. It's the kind of thing that if pushed too far results in shoegaze.[1] W.K. and his production team hold back just at the precipice, which might be the one place on the album they don't just launch off into the open air, Thelma and Louise style. The drums have been recorded to sound like punches from a meaty hand, the snare and the kick drum nearly indistinguishable, just different kinds of bass. They're played by Donald Tardy of the legendary death metal band Obituary, but they have a snap-to-grid quality, like a drum machine. That's the techno I'm hearing — however fight-or-flight the treble gets, the four on the floor keeps the listener grounded.

If it was just guitar and drums, it would be a fantastic techno-metal album — which is probably why the piano/symphonic keyboard is there, and why it counterintuitively hits so hard. I don't think we generally consider the piano an instrument of noise — obviously, it can be in the right/wrong hands — but one of melody, going back at least as far as, I dunno, Mozart. It cuts through the stomp and the metal. Even when it's used more like a percussive, rhythmic instrument, like the headbanging ellipsis in "Party Hard," the sound of it creates a third point of interest that creates productive friction against the other two sounds, like the four points of the chair that mesmerizes the circus lion.

The overall effect is that, despite being played by humans like Donald Tardy, it doesn't sound like it; it sounds like it was performed by a single cyborg Kenny Loggins from the future. (This is likely one of the other big knocks against it.) Nothing sounds organic, everything sounds artificial, with the lone exception of the sweaty, pungent vocals. You could pick out something from nearly any song, but my favorite examples show up in "Party Hard": the robotic intro and backgrond chants, and the moment at 2:18 when everything drops out inhumanly, then rushes back in with a digital wind, all within a second.

Machine-tooled Neanderthal obviousness is uncommon, but can be found in a number of places. (It's usually called "electronic body music.") Even rarer is intensely melodic machine-tooled Neanderthal obviousness. And this, for me, is where I GET WET reaches escape velocity.

I realize this is about as personal a reaction can be, but I find the songs on I GET WET — the melodies, the choruses, the hooks — stickier than flypaper. W.K. could've been content to simply open up the pit and rock our fucking block off, but he wants us to sing along as well. Surprisingly often, W.K. will turn on a dime from devil-horn chants to soaring choruses, as if cribbing from Freddie Mercury. (It just now strikes me that while I find I GET WET to be sui generis, which I talk about below, Queen is most certainly a progenitor.) But even here W.K. is being tricksy, in that he presents these catchy hooks in a (again, counterintuitive) throaty soccer hooligan roar, a kind of democratizing move ("I can shout, too!") that I think helps explain why these songs burrow their way under the skin. This heavy melodicism, of course, is where my Broadway musical comparisons appear.[2] Is it such a stretch? I genuinely think a jukebox musical could be constructed around these songs (and some slower songs from other albums, lest the audience become exhausted after twenty minutes). You'd just want to make some alterations to the lyrics.

About that: A brief word, since it was brought up on Bluesky (Hi, Christopher!). No, they're not good. Nonsensical, even. What even is going on with "I Love NYC"? (This is certainly the last big knock against it.) Not to be That Guy, but I would suggest that this is a feature, not a bug. Yes, the lyrics on "Ready to Die" (and also "I Get Wet" and "Girls Own Love") could be described as sinister and disturbing… if you take them out of context. That context being, Guy who headbangs while hitting one piano key. I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know why, exactly, his lyrics here are so often very weird. But, seeing how he stopped writing stuff like "we made a sacrifice/and now we get to take your life" just as soon as he became known as a positivity guru, I have an idea. I think W.K.'s overall project when writing and recording this, as a brand new artist with no history, was simply expressing a kind of anti-establishment, rock & roll persona, someone who doesn't follow the rules ("partying"). Being a little edgy is part of that, but I don't think those lyrics really mean much to him other than the vibe they carry. When he started getting famous and interviewed, I think that's when what he was really trying to do became visible to him, and his "philosophy of partying" came into being.  (To be clear, I don't think his positivity guru phase was a scam — in fact, I think it's probably closer to who he really is.) Regardless, my best example is a negative one: what later W.K. songs gained in coherence and meaning, they ultimately lost in power. Personally, I'll take "Ready to Die."

===

There's a legendary game designer in the TTRPG industry who, in 2001, was active on a forum I frequented. Someone asked him about this album, and I remember his reply, or at least the first part: "I don't like pastiche." This struck me at the time as a kind of "odd, but whatever" kind of comment. Now, I have two similarly negative, yet irreconciable, reactions: that's evidence of bad taste, and I GET WET isn't pastiche. The first one we can chalk up to difference of opinion and is outside the scope of this Designated Cheerleader anyway. The second one just seems obvious to me, evidenced by simple listening. What other album sounds like this? If it's pastiche, then it's pastiche in the way all rock and roll is pastiche.[3]

I think I GET WET is a great album, a synthetic, syncretic masterpiece, a slab of robometal, as if Daft Punk produced Henry Rollins, but a million times better than that could ever be. I think it might even be unique. To go further, and to its credit, I think it might even be a conceptual dead end. Where does one go after this? Where could one go? [4] That's not a deficit. That, for me, makes it the best album of 2001.[5]

So, yeah. I think I'm serious about this.

===

[1] Which is why some of my favorite black metal is the kind that slips into shoegaze, but that's neither here nor there.

[2] And here's where you mentally insert the sound of screeching tires, as I begin to realize, mid-writing, that maybe I've misspoken. Although there are, to my ear, definitely elements of Broadway musicals on this album and his other work, I'm wondering if the third element I'm hearing is actually Christian music, particularly praise. This dovetails with W.K.'s penchant for self-help/positive thinking tropes that are nascent here but become more pronounced in later albums. According to Wikipedia, "He has recalled early family trips to midnight mass as having had an enormous impact on his love for music," so this kind of checks out. Let's not even get into the dour Biblical imagery of his 2021 COVID/divorce album, GOD IS PARTYING.

[3] It's entirely possible that this legendary game designer didn't like rock and roll either because it's pastiche, that he's like that David Cross Mr. Show  "TV is a nickname" character. I dunno, never found out.

[4] W.K. kinda-sorta tried to repeat it on the 2003 follow-up THE WOLF, but he messed with the formula, losing the overdubs (I'm assuming so that what was on the record was similar to what he sounded like in concert) and dropping the tempo on a number of tracks. I like it a lot, but if THE WOLF was W.K.'s debut, I doubt we'd be talking about it in the Best Album of 2001 tournament.

[5] Okay, technically, it's co-#1 with Life Without Buildings' ANY OTHER CITY, another piece of sui generis musical art. (lol, slapping those two together, it doesn't get more full of gender than that.)

Thank you, me!

Then, for MELODY A.M., it’s @mostech6502.bsky.social. Take it away, Greg!

Melody A.M. is the debut album from Röyksopp - that is, the Norwegian electronic duo (and childhood friends) Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge. The group's name is taken from the "røyksopp" puffball mushroom, though they did swap out the slashed O for umlauts instead. Take it up with Mötley Crüe, I guess. After some years of working together they finally struck gold with "Melody A.M." a downtempo / chillout / trip-hop / etc. album that combined diverse styles with some local-ish guest vocals and somehow landed international acclaim.

There's a good chance you heard them from an ad: "Eple" used to play on first startup of new Mac OS X Panther installations, and "Remind Me" was in some of those Geico caveman commercials. Many of the songs are instrumental, but the album also features lyrics from Anneli Drecker (Bel Canto) and - familiar to 2001 Best Album voters - Erlend Øye (Kings of Convenience).

There are three things I want to point out for listeners.

The first is the warmth of their sound. It's electronic music, but never cold, clinical, or overpowering: the pair are, in the end, a couple of analogue synth-heads. The layers of old samples, vintage 70s / 80s keyboards run through vintage gear like the Roland Space Echo or, in their words, "an old Danish tube compressor that doesn’t really have a name" gives it all a decidedly organic sound. I always liked that the drums sound "real", with ringing metallic hi-hats and slightly humanized, and with a little edge. Röyksopp is not afraid to get a little saturated and noisy with it. This is a lush album to sink into.

The second is the variety. Over the "downtempo" backdrop is an upbeat synth bop in "Eple", a chill R&B in "Sparks", some solid house in "Poor Leno", cinematic excess in "Röyksopp's Night Out", spacey jazz with "She's So". The stand-out track is the introspective quasi-indie-but-bleepy "Remind Me" which I think you MUST hear, if you listen to nothing else on this album. Röyksopp themselves were not content to sit on their laurels - 2003's album "The Understanding" goes much more pop and dance: "since we’ve already
made Melody A.M., we thought that’d be a bit wrong to make it all over again. We wanted to do something different." I really appreciate that they're willing to experiment and branch out with everything they make.

And, finally, the fun. They're clearly having a good time making thi album. The samples are a little off-kilter. "So Easy" ends with a clip of the pair sharing nonsense "good frequencies" rattling off numbers until one of them just says "I'm coming over" and hangs up. "Röyksopp's Night Out" is infused with swagger: look what we can do! check out these sounds! There is longing and nostalgia in everything they've made here, but really, there's no pretense or confusing message to all of this. They just want you to enjoy hearing the music, as much as they enjoyed twiddling the knobs to make it. And they make it really easy to do so.

There's this knee-jerk reflex to make genre comparisons whenever some album comes up - "oh, this is just Air" / "Zero 7 but pop-less" / "re-heated Massive Attack" / "Daft Punk did it better" - I get it, yeah. But those always seem reductive. There's a lot more to reviewing an album than just pointing at who else you think it sounds like. I came to electronic music by a sort of enemies-to-lovers relationship: for years I mocked its "soul-lessness", until I came to really listen and know it better, and ended up learning just how much depth and emotion there is in the field. My introduction to Melody A.M. was in my second year of college. This was after becoming familiar with the biggest names - I played Paul Oakenfold's "Tranceport" mix on loop for hours, interspersed with Infected Mushroom and similar goa bangers. Cheesy vocal trance club hits and Pete Tong's Radio 1 "essential mix" on RealAudio streams. And then, Melody A.M., bought based entirely on the strength of a remix of "Remind Me". Here were two guys turning the same tools of the disco into a wistful, gorgeous soundscape, and opening up a whole new world of electronic music to me. They didn't sound like anything I'd heard before.

This album will probably lose to Weezer. That's fine. I hope you listen to it anyway.

PS - I was fortunate that my CD was the US Special Edition, which includes the Ernest St. Laurent "Moonfish Mix" of "Remind Me" - a driving synth house odyssey that I absolutely adore and suggest checking out if you're at all interested.
PSS - Also check out the music video for "Remind Me", a cool trip through an Ikea-style infographic world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF-7TRy7Ylg

Thanks, Greg!

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, #5 Björk, VESPERTINE defeated #69 Air, 10 000 HZ LEGEND, 144-38-3.

Thanks,

Kent