Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#7 Gorillaz, GORILLAZ

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#58 Stereolab, SOUND-DUST

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 GORILLAZ, and it’s from @kezme.bsky.social. Take it away, Kezme!

Of the 2001 albums I bought at the time, GORILLAZ is likely the one I’ve listened to in full the most, having never really gone out of my rotation in the time since then. At the time, I came to the album the way most of us probably did – through the big singles Clint Eastwood and 19-2000 being flogged to death on radio at the time – but when I played it I found an album that was a lot stranger and more experimental than those more commercially-friendly tracks would lead you to expect.

This is of course the legend of Gorillaz – Damon Albarn wanting a side project in which he could have a free hand to explore musical ideas outside the pressures that come along with the mainstream success of Blur, a side project which ultimately ended up garnering more commercial / mainstream success than Blur itself as the 2000s unfolded. But this self-titled album comes before that success, and you can feel that freedom to experiment all the way across it, unconstrained in a way that future Gorillaz albums aren’t. This might sound like a warning, but be reassured this is all still very accessible – it’s not Fennesz, Albarn does still have a pop sensibility.

Now I’m certainly not qualified to point out everything going on musically on this album – my own music theory education being almost entirely in a classical tradition – but what I do recognise ticks a lot of boxes for me. There’s interesting samples used in a musical way, there’s a lot of playing around with time signatures – 5/4 features the lead guitar playing in 5/4 over a standard 4/4 drum pattern, and New Genius (Brother) does something similar with the cymbals. There’s deliberately dischordant intervals and notes that warble off-key, but in a way that’s clearly musical and not just cacophanous. It all reads as ‘art’, but I think without crossing the line into pretentiousness.

Speaking of art, I know this album was part of a wider project involving the animated film clips and other media featuring the “virtual band”, but I’ve personally never really engaged deeply with that part of Gorillaz (I do have their DVD projects in my collection somewhere) – I think GORILLAZ the album stands on its own as a complete work. It does work very much as an album – there aren’t really any tracks here I’d rather play on their own than as part of a full album listen. I’d consider the one or two remixes at the end, depending on the version of the album you have, as bonus tracks rather than part of the album proper, though.

2001 was clearly a time when a lot of popular music was trying to make a break with the past and figure out what the future was going to be. GORILLAZ didn’t turn out to be what the future of music looked like; it’s not even really what the future of Gorillaz ended up looking like. I don’t think that takes away from the album, though – it’s something that I’ve been listening to for more than half my life now, and easily one of the standout albums released in 2001.

Thank you, Kezme!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Thanks,

Kent