Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#23 Drive-By Truckers, SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA

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vs.

#42 Ladytron, 604

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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 SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA, it’s @janos.bsky.social. Take it away, János!

Unstoppable force meets immovable object. They form a band.

You never have to ask where Patterson Hood stands on an issue. He will tell you. You will know how he feels about Neil Young. About college football and politics. About growing up in the South and about leaving the South. About people who are more complicated than their public image. And yes, he'll tell you about Lynyrd Skynyrd. He will tell you this in many words, taking up roughly 70 of SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA's 90 minute runtime. He'll take a five minute spoken word song to lay out exactly where he stands. And if that isn't enough, he annotates every song of the album on the Drive-By Truckers website. Patterson Hood is an open book. There are rarely hidden meanings to be found in a Hood song. What you see is what you get.

He's also a force of nature. Watch any of their performances or just listen to the damn album. The energy is irresistible. When I listen to SRO, it's this infectious energy that carries me through its movie-length runtime, from the opening one-two punch of DAYS OF GRADUATION and RONNIE AND NEIL through THE SOUTHERN THING, the disc two opener LET THERE BE ROCK until the bitter end, the plane crash that took Ronnie Van Zant, Cassie and Steve Gaines' lives. Even the story behind SRO feels like Hood made it happen through sheer force of will. See, the album is based on an idea for a screenplay he had about a fictional band named Betamax Guillotine even before DBT were founded. The band then wrote songs for their "rock opera" for four years, until after two albums and a live album they had enough material to record it, as Hood tells the story, "in Birmingham, upstairs in a uniform shop during an early September heat wave, with no air-conditioning". Then they had to raise money from fans to be able to self-release the album. Somehow, it worked: thanks to word of mouth and rave reviews, it sold out and the next year they signed with a label to re-release the album in a wider printing.

And then there's Cooley. Mike Cooley is, well, he's simply the coolest. Just look at him. His lanky stature, his calm stage presence, that deep singing voice, everything about him radiates coolness. It helps that he writes the best songs too. Hood and Cooley are opposites in temperament and songwriting style (though they stand on the same side politically). But it is this tension that makes DBT so special. Where Hood typically floods an album with his high output (he has a lot to say ok?), Cooley contributes like three to five songs but they're ALWAYS classics. A Cooley song feels like opening a Christmas present. Immaculately crafted, highly literary and timeless. Of course, he refuses to ever explain any of his songs. Let them speak for themselves. In the case of SRO, the clear highlight is ZIP CITY, a song that feels like it's been around since the invention of the electric guitar.

The Truckers' third guitarist at the time, Rob Malone, contributes two songs too and tbh they're not my favorites. But I'll give Malone kudos for creating DBT's powerful three-guitar sound that places them firmly in Skynyrd's musical tradition. When Malone leaves the band following SRO's release, the Truckers shop around for a replacement guitarist and come across some 22-year-old kid named Jason Isbell. But that's a story for another bracket.

Don't get it twisted: SRO isn't a concept album about Lynyrd Skynyrd, though the spirit of Skynyrd haunts every song. I'm not even sure it's a proper "rock opera" with a cohesive plot (does any "rock opera" have a cohesive plot?), but it is an album that flows remarkably well. It is, however, a grandiose statement about making art in the American South as a leftist, and about being unashamed of where you come from without brushing aside the darkest parts of its history. It's an album about setting the record straight. It's about the Duality of the Southern Thing. And yes, it also rocks. It rocks so hard.

The Truckers will go on to make several more classic albums. You can argue the followup DECORATION DAY or their next sprawling concept album THE DIRTY SOUTH or the post-Isbell BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK are every bit SRO's equal. But SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA will always be my favorite. Because it is a scrappy band from Alabama using every dollar they saved up to create one magnum opus. They had no certain future. This is a band that's hungry, a band that has everything to prove, and they will prove it in the grandest way possible. And goddamnit, they did it. They fucking pulled it off.

Thank you, János!

Then, for 604, it’s @bobbker.bsky.social. Take it away, Robert!

As a cis white man who just turned 50, a divorced dad, a guy who lives in Maine and has been known to sport a beard and imbibe the occasional IPA, who has a favorite weed dispensary and keeps his hiking boots close at hand, it’s pretty clear who I’m voting for between Ladytron and My Morning Jacket, right?

It’s got to be Ladytron.

Sure, it’s true that because of my particular identity, I’m not as qualified as some to question the general “Meet Me in the Bathroom” narrative that frames the Return of Rock as the realm of straight white dudes and Karen O, and how the queer spaces became largely gentrified and the queer artists largely erased in the process (no Scissor Sisters?).

It’s also true that I’m not as qualified as some to frame the electroclash moment alongside an rise in transgender visibility and a coming-of-age moment of transgender identity. How bands like Ladytron (whose very name, in addition to the Roxy Music origin story, evokes Wendy Carlos’ work on the Tron score) followed a blueprint of how new wave and synth-pop artists like Annie Lennox and Gary Numan bent the very concept of gender into more nebulous, androgynous areas.

Instead I’ll reflect on Ladytron’s impact my own identity as a middle-aged cis white guy who spent his 50th birthday with divorce lawyers. I’m well aware that this makes me a walking cliché, but I was surprised at how all of the clichéd music choices bounced off me like bullets off Superman. No Bob Dylan, no Elliott Smith, no Wilco (OK some Wilco), no Fleetwood Mac, and my god no National or Bon Iver or (pick your own indie-rock poison).

For about two months, all I listened to were the Bee Gees. Pricey production, propuslive rhythms, absolute gibberish vocals. When that grew tiresome, I blew the dust off of my Ladytron and Goldfrapp CDs and lugged them into the car, where I spun them for the first time in years.

The pull was clear: I needed something to numb the senses, to sink into a cocaine stupor without actually doing cocaine. That’s another thing electroclash is good for. One of the biggest songs to come out of the early 00s movement is called “Fuck the Pain Away.” On “Another Breakfast With You” (from “604”) Helen Marnie sings “I didn't feel anything when you told me that you didn't feel a thing when I told you that I didn't feel a thing, another breakfast with you.” What the lyrics are trying to say is that neither party felt a thing.

Marnie speak-sings the lyrics, as she does throughout the album, sometimes feigning indifference through vocal distortion, sometimes pitching her voice up a tad into what could almost be a caricature of the feminine. Across the pond, Julian Casablancas used vocal effects to give his voice an unbothered masculine tone closer to Lou Reed’s character than his natural voice could likely get. Here, Marnie often aspires to Laurie Anderson, notably on the department-store announcements of the capitalism-prodding satire “Paco!”

While Ladytron’s best work would be just ahead of them, they would never sound as ugly as “604” again. There are sounds here that you don’t find on too many other records—percussion that sounds like shaking a garbage can; squelches and belches that sound like Donald Duck beatboxing (“Commodore Rock” is a prime example). The record is a hangover in search of a buzz, and younger critics inventing terms like “indie sleaze” likely found this album to be one of the dots worth connecting. Which is to say, when you take a retro aesthetic from the past and extend it forever into the future, the moments melt away and a timelessness takes over. “604” feels as vibrant as ever today, particularly when you turn to it to feel nothing at all.

Thank you, Robert!

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, #10 The Shins, OH, INVERTED WORLD defeated #74 Super Furry Animals, RINGS AROUND THE WORLD, 125-103-1.

Thanks,

Kent