The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch) 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!

What's the best Beatles album NOT from the Beatles? Why that'd be Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend," probably the best power pop album in the last forty years. I don't make that claim lightly, and I will die on this hill. Matthew Sweet's first two albums are so negligible, they might as well have not even been made. They were specks of dust, electropop banality that didn't have a hint or a spark of what was to come from this Nebraska boy who'd moved to Athens, GA, chasing the R.E.M. dream. But after his first two albums flopped, his marriage was on the rocks and Sweet decided just to absolutely go for broke, to take a single last called shot that he hoped might buy him a little bit of daylight left in his career. What he ended up making was a whole goddamn supernova of sunshine, and an album that continues to gain new fans each and every year.

So here's the thing: Matthew Sweet knows how to write great songs. But sometimes that isn't enough. By the time Sweet was recording his third album, he'd basically changed his entire band, and gained two utter juggernauts trading lead guitar duties, Richard Lloyd (who was in the band Television) and Robert Quine (who'd played with such barely known people as Brian Eno, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Richard Hell & the Voidoids and, oh yeah, Lou Fucking REED.) He also had Fred Maher (who also played with Lou Reed) and Ric Menck (of Velvet Crush) on drums. Sweet decided he was going to write the most personal album of his life - about his divorce, falling out of love, falling into love with someone new, and all the complexities in between - and assembled a killer team to help bring it to life. His record label, A&M, had released him from his contract, because they basically didn't have faith in him, and by the time he got everyone into the studio in 1990, he was officially divorced from both his wife and A&M. So he just let it all that out in the album.

One of the first things you'll notice when listening to "Girlfriend" is that there is no reverb on any of the tracks, something basically unheard of at the time. At a moment when everyone in mainstream music wanted everything to sound overwhelming, Sweet and company went for a more intimate, stripped down approach. Instead of cavernous drums, Maher and Menck piped their drums through a compressor, to flatten them out, and then pushed towards one end of the audio spectrum, something the Beatles had been known to do. Sweet was unapologetic about swiping other tricks from the Beatles, like snippets of backwards audio, multilayered harmonies and even bits of amp hum. But the only singer on the album is Sweet himself, so he's double, triple, quadruple tracking vocals, to make a chorus of Matthews. They also played around a lot with using the left/right channels for effect, as the Beatles had done as well. This was one of the first records to teach me what a "headphones album" was, with guitars that would drift left or right, vocals that would seem to loop around your head while you're standing still. On the title track of the album, you'll hear the first guitar almost entirely on the right channel, then a lead in the middle, and then a third guitar on the left, all working together.

The song "Girlfriend" was originally called "Goodfriend," but literally everyone he played the song for thought he was saying "Girlfriend," so Sweet knew he couldn't fight the gravity of it, and changed the song title and the chorus accordingly. And it was this one song that basically captured everyone's attention, from the moment they heard it. It was this song that an intern at Zoo Entertainment couldn't stop listening to, and eventually the head of that label asked what it was, and decided to give the album a chance. The music video featured anime before almost anyone in the states even knew what that was, using bits from Space Adventure Cobra. He'd also use anime for his second video, "I've Been Waiting," but this time from Urusei Yatsura. The video caught a lot of people's attention, and suddenly the guy who'd been on the verge of losing it all was on top of the world.

I cannot overstate how all of these great songs are doubled down on by the amazing guitar work of Lloyd/Quine. The pyrotechnic explosions of guitar frenzy in the title track alone are enough to knock your hair back, and yet, not once do they ever feel like they're taking over the song, just adding one on top of the other, in perfect harmony. Just listen at the 1:44 mark in the title track, when Quine takes his guitar and blasts off for orbit, only to bring it in for a solid landing at 2:18, just in time for the chorus to give you another warm, velvet hug.

Now the album isn't entirely full of rockers. There's some definite darker songs, like the country-esque "Winona" (named after the actress, natch) or the achingly broken "You Don't Love Me." Towards the end of the album, you even get soft sunset tracks like "Your Sweet Voice," which could have easily been something from the Beach Boys. It also sort of closes the album, although not really. See, at the end of track 6, "Evangeline," my personal favorite track, you can hear a little bit of vinyl skipping, like the record is over, and track 7, "Day For Night," starts with an audible needle drop, like the whole thing was an old school record. The last twenty seconds or so of "Your Sweet Voice" is a record player that's ended but nobody's come and adjusted the player yet, so the last three tracks are sort of "bonus tracks." Two of the three, "Does She Talk?" and "Holy War" are proper bangers, while the final song, "Nothing Lasts," is just Matthew on an acoustic, singing a forlorn tune, while Quine colors in delicate little pensive shades of misery and loss.

Originally, Sweet wanted to call the album "Nothing Lasts," but he wanted the cover picture more. The image on the cover is of actress Tuesday Weld, and Sweet loved that picture, thought it captured exactly what he wanted out of the album, and Weld, who is known to be a little reclusive, allowed him to use the photo, but objected to it being called "Nothing Lasts," a sentiment that Sweet immediately understood and regretted, changing the album to "Girlfriend," and the moment was born.

Since 1991, Sweet's continued to put out good-to-great albums, and there isn't any album he's released since then that doesn't have at least three or four great songs on it, but nothing has been as wall-to-wall unskippable as "Girlfriend" was, both as an album and as a song. Weirdly enough, it wasn't his biggest success. (That would be his fifth album, "100% Fun," and his most successful single, "Sick Of Myself," was from that album.) But if you're talking sheer longevity, the album everyone's going to be talking about first and foremost in Sweet's eventual obit is going to be "Girlfriend." He's still at it, though, and released his 15th album, "Catspaw," in January of this year. But what a high watermark he set in 1991. Nothing sounded like it then. Shit, nothing's sounded like it since!

If there is such a thing as a perfect pop song, I would argue there's probably only three or four contenders for that mantle - "Hey Jude," "Good Vibrations" and, undeniably, Matthew Sweet's song "Girlfriend."

-- Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch)