The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jjkamensky for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

Everclear has enough reference points but it doesn’t really sound like anything else. In parts it doesn’t even sound like sound. You could imagine stumbling in to it mid-performance in the back room of a small ethnic restaurant in a mini-mall, in an unnamed part of a mid-size city at one in the morning, Mark Eitzel singing his heart utterly bare, oblivious to every single person in the audience. It could be just you and the waitresses cleaning up. 

The rest of the American Music Club carry him gently or forcefully into the songs, which ever is needed. The sound is eighty percent a ride cymbal and forty percent a Fender amp set down rough with the reverb cranked to ten. You can ID Eitzel as some kind of a late night troubadour, but it’s not a pretense or a costume. He’s the one who’s been drinking, not the piano. (There’s no piano.)

Every song sounds whispery. The loud ones too. They have the whispery edges of a howl in a wind storm. “Why won’t you stay?“ he asks, straight ahead, in the opener. His heart stays bare throughout, even when he’s only revealing numbness, like in “Sick Of Food“. Even when he doesn’t know you that well, he cares about you: “Your ex-girlfriend told me you were having a hard time.” Only if you stay until the end does it feel as if he’s right there with you in the back room, because that’s when he tells you he’s moving on: “I’d like to hang out,“ he admits in the last track, “Jesus’s Hands,” “but I can tell that you’re not a drinking crowd.” And out he goes,  leaving your edges whispery, like a howl in a wind storm.

-- @jjkamensky