Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#10 The Shins, OH, INVERTED WORLD

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vs.

#74 Super Furry Animals, RINGS AROUND THE WORLD

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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 [[email protected]] 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 OH, INVERTED WORLD, it’s @bermanmatt.bsky.social. Take it away, Matt!

I know: Natalie Portman told you that song would change your life. And it was a great song! But now... the associations with that movie that everyone loved then turned brutally on... it's too much. It taints the whole thing. So this whole other album that features that song is cringe now. Right?

Put aside Garden State. Put aside New Slang entirely. Focus on the rest of the album - the part that isn't going to change your life, but might make you feel better anyway. These are catchy songs! There's sadness and happiness and it all feels kind of tied together and fleeting. The well-known story here is that James Mercer - turning 30 and going nowhere and tired of playing music that sounded like other people in other bands - made himself an album that sounded like the music he wanted to hear. Inspired more by bands like Belle and Sebastian and the Elephant 6 crew, he wrote a bunch of music, pressed his old bandmates into being his new bandmates, and somehow (the internet) got known.

You've got jagged echo-y whistle rockers (Caring is Creepy), peppy melodic nuggets (One By One All Day, Know Your Onion!), lots of weird floaty stuff and strange background instruments, and a lovely little send-off in The Past and Pending. It feels hopeful and sad and tuneful and empty all at once and it does it all in 33 minutes. Not too shabby. This is the sound of a man reaching for a way out from floating through life and thinking it might be too late but he'd sure as hell better try anyway. You can feel it, right?

And as for New Slang... it's a hell of a song. Maybe it won't change your life, but it sure changed James Mercer's.

Thanks, Matt!

Then, for RINGS AROUND THE WORLD, it’s @bickley.bsky.social! This was originally published when RINGS AROUND THE WORLD faced off against REVEAL; it probably still works if you mentally replace R.E.M. with The Shins. Take it away, Chris!

Sticking Rings Around the World up against Reveal really highlights what makes Super Furry Animals such an essential band. I love R.E.M., and for a band starting their third decade with a 12th album, it's a perfectly cromulent listen. But while Reveal awkwardly seesaws between balladeering and electronic pussyfooting, Rings Around the World was a HD masterpiece: the sound of an accomplished band assured with what they were doing.

You could make a statistical claim that Super Furry Animals are the most successful outsider's band in the UK. They had the most top 40 singles without ever having a fabled top 10 hit to their name. They were too late for the golden Britpop boom (a blessing, some might say) and too geographically detached to be an accessory to the burgeoning US-weird-indie scene of the 00s, but maybe this purgatory was the Furries' greatest strength. They could do what they wanted without feeling confined by expectations. They could do death metal, techno, cinematic sweeps and progressive country and it all coalesces into a super furry ball of genius.

Super Furry Animals are a rare case of a non-gimmicky gimmick band. Their single The Man Don't Give a Fuck (heavily sampling a Steely Dan line) took the record for the most "fucks" in a song not once, but after its re-release, twice. But it slaps, so who cares? They owned a tank, of which Don Henley from the Eagles became the proprietor. Rings Around the World was the first record to be simultaneously released on both CD and DVD. Why? Because they could. Gimmicks usually mask a lack of something, but these notorious ploys were merely adjuncts to what is a certified hi-fidelity adventure.

Speaking of gimmicks, Paul McCartney features on Receptacle for the Respectable performing the vegetables, in homage to his uncredited role on the Beach Boys' Smile. There is a very small overlap in the Venn diagram of artists who could successfully rope a Beatle into performing on a song, and artists who would even have the idea of him to eat celery into a mic.

Rings Around the World is a crisp album. It sounds aurally perfected. The crunches of Sidewalk Serfer Girl could have disintegrated into a noise-war trench with another band, and Run! Christian, Run! is a HD rendition of their climactic Mountain People from Radiator.

Amidst the chaos of colours are some genuine pop bangers, though off-kilter bangers of course. It's Not the End of the World is a dreamy ballad and Juxtapozed With U is a witty delight. The word juxtaposed would not have entered the vocabulary of their contemporaries, let alone their lyrics. (Drawing) Rings Around the World (if a touch long, surprisingly for a 3:30 song) is more of a theme tune than a title track. After diving deep into Cymru on Mwng, this was the Super Furries sending sonic signals on a satellite expanse across the world.

I could cheerlead for most of R.E.M.'s records, and for Reveal, I heartily pat them on the back. But Super Furry Animals were a band producing awe and wonder, a feeling you cannot ascribe to Reveal.

Thanks, Chris!

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, #26 Jimmy Eat World, BLEED AMERICAN and #39 Guided by Voices, ISOLATION DRILLS tied at 130 votes each. Current Best Album by-laws state that in the case of a tie, the higher seeded album, in this case BLEED AMERICAN, shall be declared the winner. BLEED AMERICAN defeats ISOLATION DRILLS, 130-130.

Thanks, but not for the tie,

Kent