The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @bermanmatt 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!

I suspect a good chunk of Material Issue's fans first encountered Material Issue the same way I did: Late night on MTV's 120 Minutes. The first thing I saw of them was a man in a leather jacket - shot in stark black-and-white - running down an alley towards the camera, as the camera itself pulled back, ever out of reach. It was to be as good a metaphor as any for the band itself, with popularity and success seemingly just there ahead of them, but never quite close enough to grab onto.

A sparse guitar riff starts, a quick one-two drumbeat, and three kinda goofy-looking -- if noticeably Mod -- dudes lay down a peppy minor key bit of longing. And then a buzzsaw guitar line breaks in at the chorus, and the large-shirted, gangly man singing unleashes an anguished shout, "VALERIE LOVES ME."

I didn't know much about these guys, but I was pretty sure: 1) Valerie did *not* love them, but 2) I was gonna check 'em out and see if I might. Oh, and 3) the ch-chunk ch-chunk guitar they casually threw in to the middle of that song was really fucking cool.

"Valerie Loves Me" is the first song on Material Issue's International Pop Overthrow, and it makes a promise the rest of the album mostly makes good on. True to its name, this is a blast of sweet, tormented power pop - not as heavy on harmony as you'd find with some earlier power pop bands, but positively overflowing with smart melodies, great hooks, and songs about girls. Fully 4 of the tracks on here have women's names in the title - not the same woman! - and a good chunk of the rest are sung to or about some love or another.

The music is, for the most part, simple and straightforward. There are no tour de force solos or heavy instrumentation beyond what the band itself can bring in real time - just the guitar, bass, and drums of a trio focused on laying down catchy songs they could actually go out and play. The bass stays simple and rooted, the guitar gets jangly and sometimes overdriven, and the drums tight, but Jim Ellison's quavering vocals do the heavy lifting here - he can hit the notes clear and high when necessary, but he mostly infuses these songs with personality. There's an energized longing and sense of sadness to his vocals that cuts sharply against the often peppy melodies. There's also some sneer in here, but more often than not, the songs that stand out are the ones about crushes old or new, requited or not.

Between the buzzy longing of "Valerie Loves Me," the (pre-Sugar but) Sugar-esque "Diane," The La's-y (sans accented) "Renee Remains the Same," and could-be junior high slow dance staple "The Letter," the album is somewhat front-loaded with its best material. As we ease into the middle, the songs tend to get simpler and more streamlined, but also more punkily insistent, with momentary respites like the lovely "Very First Lie," before ending with some, unfortunately, slightly less memorable numbers than it kicked off with. But even there, there's always something - a smart hook, a memorable lyric, a few sharp elbows to cut through simplicity - that stands out. And the weight and quality of those initial songs stays with you - this was something different than your glossy radio music, and not at all what most bands were serving up in the alt rock underground in 1991.

Sadly, despite the initial buzz that greeted International Pop Overthrow, the band never seemed to get the sustained national profile it deserved. And while those who heard the album loved it, a power pop renaissance was not in the cards, as the whole concept of underground music, 120 Minutes and Buzz bands was about to get hit by a tsunami called Nirvana and the Seattle scene. The lovelorn simplicity of Jim Ellison's music was washed away by the torrent of grunge, and Material Issue unfortunately soon followed. Material Issue released two more albums to declining interest before Jim Ellison tragically took his own life in 1996.

While Jim and the band are gone, the music Material Issue made remains, never better than it was on International Pop Overthrow. They are remembered both by fans and by the International Pop Overthrow festival, founded in 1997 and named in their honor. With this album, they helped carry the power pop torch to a new generation of fans at a time when the sound was distinctly missing from the musical landscape. I hope you give it a chance, and I hope you like it enough to pass it on to the next round.

– @bermanmatt