Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#2 The Strokes, IS THIS IT

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vs.

#23 Drive-By Truckers, SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA

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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 three Designated Cheerleaders today, and the first two are for IS THIS IT. First up, it's @tomewing.bsky.social. Take it away, Tom!

Is This It is fundamentally a pop record. I bought it at the same time as the Kylie album which is a pop album in a surprisingly similar way to The Strokes - pop that’s stylish and new but also in love with pop’s own past, specifically a particular idea of New York cool. At the distance of 25 years, the difference between Studio 54 and CBGBs no longer seemed terribly important. At the distance of 25 more years, it matters even less.

The Strokes is a new wave record decades after the new wave receded, a band imitating bands imitating the Velvet Underground’s VU and Another View (for a while the easiest records to get by them). Kylie is a pop star wearing disco like a vintage dress. Neither - sorry “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” - sound remotely like the future, though plenty of music from 2001 did. But both are pop music, understanding that part of pop’s central appeal is great hooks, cool worn lightly, a nice arse.

The Strokes did turn out to be the future (briefly) and people have written books mythologising that. What struck me at the time was how exhausted they sounded by their own poses: Julian Casablancas’ vocals are a bored croak, straining for affect then fraying into a trail of ennui. Is this it? Can this really be where the grand boho rock tradition is ending up? He sometimes sounds up for it, or at least the picture of hot diffidence, but more often he feels the weight of indie hopes like Frodo feels the One Ring. “I will do my best” he sings on “Someday”, sounding sad and small.

What saves him are his band, who refuse to slack off or slow down, approaching each song like a sprint, functional and lean, giving their singer’s langour a chance to unfold itself on each song without actually losing any of the track’s energy. Is This It is admirable in its refusal to dick around. Nothing breaks four minutes, a minor miracle in a bloated year. Everything has a functional hook or two, and everything could be danced to.

Someone who wrote for my site at the time - I forget which writer it was, I’m sorry - had the excellent insight that the Strokes and the scene around them were American Britpop. A retro scene based on pop’s first principles (see above about the nice arses) and driven by bright young things in a bright young city. Fair enough, I think. Is This It reminds me a lot of Elastica by Elastica, the same “we’re stealing stuff? What are you going to do about it?” energy.

But while I don’t have much time for most Britpop and less time for most of what came after The Strokes, I think Is This It is even better than that, because of that ennui, that sense of decadence, the feeling you get that the band know it’s all downhill from here, for them and for rock music and white boy cool itself.

The second worst song on Is This It is the only one that you might briefly worry is about something, “New York City Cops”, and it’s still pretty good. (You can forgive it as it annoyed the actual NYC Cops, too). The worst song is “Trying Your Luck”, the closest they come to sloth. And the best song on Is This It isn’t on Is This It at all, it’s the bootleg version of “Hard To Explain” that grants Casablancas the release from toil he’s been searching for and puts Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle” vocal line over the top. Suddenly a space opens up where The Strokes and Kylie could meet.

It works because “Hard To Explain” is a disco record, the realisation of which unlocked the whole album for me back in 2001. The rhythms of Is This It aren’t sophisticated or even groovy but they are party rhythms and that’s why they still sound good.

A Dedicated Champion by Tom Ewing. Written in the 35’48” the album took to play. Over and out.

Thank you, Tom!

Then, also for IS THIS IT, we have @renamj.bksy.social. Take it away, Rena!

Full disclosure: I did not nominate The Strokes' debut album Is This It for the 2001 album tournament, nor did I give it a seed vote. It doesn't need my help, and I wanted to champion lesser-known albums that could really use the boost. But it was my favorite album when I was an actual teenager in 2001.

2001 was a pivotal year for me: I became a high school senior (Class of 2002!); I was literally in my AP U.S. History class when 9/11 happened (lol); I turned 17 in October; I was accepted to my first choice college (they had rolling admissions so I could apply early); and in December I finally got my driver's license on my third try. I was ready for the next chapter of my life as a young adult, even though I had no idea what to expect. I knew I would have a better life..."someday."

I was getting more into music around this time, reading album reviews and watching MTV2 after school. Early on in high school I went through a "pretending to be normie" phase where I tried to be like everyone else - wearing trendy mall clothes and listening to Top 40 (nothing wrong with pop per se, but most of my peers were mainstreamers who didn't have a deeper appreciation of music). To put it bluntly, it wasn't me. I didn't really know who I was yet, and school is a terribly confining environment. It goes without saying that music is an enormous part of my life, and this was only the beginning.

For the record, I did go through an "indie" phase in my late teens/early twenties. Then I discovered SoulSeek and a much broader scope of music. One great thing about music communities like this one is discovering just how much music is out there, beyond what gets written about in Rolling Stone or Pitchfork (I was never a fan, I found them off-putting even then) or other major music sites. As I always say, look beyond the canon.

The Strokes had a deafening amount of hype around them, and even then they had very vocal haters on message boards. "The Strokes are jokes" and all that. Is This It is the Anora of the indie revival scene (personally, I liked Sean Baker's Oscar-winning film but did not love it.). Anyway, I bought the CD, maybe at the local CD World, and I played it over and over (favorite tracks: "The Modern Age," "Soma," "Barely Legal"). I couldn't really relate to the lyrics per se - I was awkward and inexperienced and more focused on my grades anyway. I just thought the songs were catchy.

In retrospect they were sort of a "gateway" band for me. There are folks who got into The Velvet Underground, The Cars, The Modern Lovers, and Television through them and I think that's great! Listening to these songs now, they're not exactly earth shattering but they're still fun. I actually think their second album, Room on Fire, is even better.

Is this the best album of 2001? No! Not in my humble opinion, anyway. As a work of art, I think Björk's Vespertine is far more interesting, to name one example. But it meant something to me at one point in my life and that does matter.

Thank you, Rena!

Finally, last but not least, for SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA, it's @janos.bsky.social. Take it away, János!

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!

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 #4 Daft Punk, DISCOVERY, 176-127-2.

Thanks,

Kent