Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#1 Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#16 Low, THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE

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 [[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 YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, it’s @asleepykisser.bsky.social. Take it away, Zenith, Wannabe Mermaid!

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can


There is something wrong with me




In general, it’s a little hard for me to write about my middle/high school life. Much of my memory of that time is filtered through intense dissociation, depression and gender dysphoria. So I can’t really say exactly what it felt like to listen to YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT for the first time anymore. What I can do is attempt to describe what’s it has become for me.

My first Wilco album was A GHOST IS BORN. I was always a library kid, and I spent many days scouring through the shelves picking up books, DVDs and CDs for whatever I thought I remembered the gen-xers I followed online said was good. I was immediately taken in by the plaintive singing and jam-band-y passages. I watched many live version of “At Least That’s What You Said” on the library internet computers. I found one of “my” bands.

When I finally got around to YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, I had already listened to, burned, and memorized all the words to a few different Wilco albums. This one slot right in. I’ve cried many teenage tears listening to Jeff Tweedy sing “I shake like a toothache / when I hear myself sing”. And I felt a little less lonely when I did.


My Mind is filled with radio cures


Electronic surgical words

Thank you, Zenith!

Then, for THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, it’s @kevinalexander.bsky.social. Take it away, Kevin!

Duluth Minnesota is incredibly underrated. Yes, the winter weather is, um, “problematic,” but if you can tolerate a little meteorological volatility, it’s well worth your time.

Part of the appeal lies in its being right on Lake Superior. It’s a majestic, magical body of water that does well to remind one of their place in the universe. The city is also close to the Iron Range, where a lot of taconite pellets begin their journey to become products and infrastructure in our lives. They’re carried on freighters (”lakers”) that traverse the Great Lakes for most of the year, hauling all the underrated stuff we never notice until it’s not there. It’s what the Edmund Fitzgerald was carrying when the lake took her, spawning a song by Gordon Lightfoot and starting the tradition of that track appearing in every jukebox within 200 miles. It’s probably a licensing requirement. I dunno. Either way, the lake is now synonymous with the boat, and vice versa.

That’s a lot of words to say that Duluth is more important to people than they might realize. It’s also a great place to see a lot of ships coming and going.

When talking about transportation, I always have to remind myself that not everyone is as into it (or cares) like I do. I’m the kind of person who works with airplanes all day and then takes a vacation somewhere with front-row seats to shipping lanes. I like watching these leviathans come and go—from filling your entire field of vision to becoming a mirage on the horizon, then disappearing completely. They’re stately, steady, and a little anachronistic. Frankly, I’m often amazed at how much mileage (literally and figuratively) we’ve gotten out of this fleet of lakers, many of which were in service alongside the Edmund Fitzgerald, and have been going strong for over fifty years.

Duluth also gave us Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, aka slowcore elder statesmen Low, and bear with me as I make one of the clunkiest analogies in the history of this newsletter. A lot of people don’t realize how important Low has been in their musical diet. If you like slowcore at all, Low’s probably a big reason for that. If you enjoy beautiful vocal pairings—well, I have some good news. If you like simple, stripped-down music with only rudimentary mechanics, you can find that at both the harbor and on records like Things We Lost in the Fire.

Like the lake following the seasons, across their career, Low’s sound has moved from icy to something warmer and open. Things We Lost in the Fire does a good job of capturing that shift. There’s a glow that feels (to my ear, anyway) like the light of morning. Guitars hum and whir like the thrum of diesel engines, drums pulse at an unhurried pace, and the vocal harmonies fit nicely against the space around them, without ever threatening to take them over. Songs such as “Sunflower,” “Dinosaur Act,” and “July” feel more open(?) than songs from earlier records. Elsewhere, touches of strings and acoustic elements give the record a little movement without losing its placidity. Is placidity a word? It is now.

I should mention that this record sounds like most every other Low record, but what else was it going to sound like? Long winters can make people do strange things, but it’s not like they were going to spin off and do their version of Metal Machine Music. This, of course, is reductive and akin to saying every ship looks the same. Neither is true. There are variations here, and in a couple of spots, things plod along right on schedule until, as noted, there’s a burst of vocals, strings, or some other surprise element(s).

The knock on them is this consistency, this sameness, but like a boat still moving along after almost six decades, why would they have tried to fix what wasn’t broken?

Thank you, Kevin!

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, #11 Missy Elliott, MISS E... SO ADDICTIVE defeated #22 System of a Down, TOXICITY, 135-78-2.

Thanks,

Kent