The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @brendonbouzard 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!

Chapterhouse should’ve been huge.

Here was a likably accessible band making the poppiest record of the shoegaze moment. Whirpool has hooky melodies, jangly guitars, swirling psychedelic vocals, and Madchester-influenced dance beats. And yet this album disappeared. It charted in the UK for less than a month. If you look at its Wikipedia entry today, it’s mostly about how a rerelease from 2006 was disastrously mastered from 128kbps mp3 files. 

What happened? Was the market for shoegaze oversaturated with the pure, uncut shit? Or were they simply fated to be an also-ran? From their inception, the Reading-based band was linked with the more-famous Spaceman 3, whom they backed on multiple tours, and Ride, who Melody Maker inexplicably cast as their rivals in a 1990 profile. Every step of the band’s career has seemed doomed, in retrospect, from the awful Whirlpool rerelease to a reunion tour aborted by the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in 2010. The (mostly bad) 1993 follow-up record Blood Music didn’t help.

And yet this record stands up as one of the secret wonders of the shoegaze canon. It’s got a stellar pop single that should’ve played on MTV (“Pearl” — featuring guest backing vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and that “When the Levee Breaks” drum sample from a million other songs), guitar-driven rockers like “Something More” and “Guilt,” and dreamy, atmospheric digressions like “Autosleeper.” If nothing else, check out my favorite track, the vibrant, up-tempo album opener “Breather.” 

Is this as good as Loveless? No. Of course its fucking not — but it’s a stellar record that blends two strains of British rock in ways that are exciting. If there’s a silver lining to Chapterhouse never quite making it, maybe it’s this: this is the rare 1991 album that feels fresh and new in 2021.

-- @brendonbouzard