The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @hellonfriscobay 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!

My first memorable exposures to head-to-head music matchups were long before Twitter existed. My local “Modern Rock” radio station (“Live 105”) would test out songs for possible consideration for their playlists by playing them head-to-head and having listeners call in to register their preference, with the promise of free concert tickets for the 105th caller. I participated enough to win the coveted tickets once or twice but I remember the identities of just a few of the songs, perhaps because it was usually clear they were borderline fits for what was my favorite station at the time. Dinosaur Jr.’s “The Wagon” seemed too college-rock for a pre-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” playlist on which New Order and the B-52’s were still royalty. Psychefunkapus’s “Surfin’ on Jupiter” was too silly. The only song I recall instantly falling in love with was “It Don’t Heal Clean”, by a synthesizer-era singer-songwriter I’d never heard of (by 1991 the songs from her 1987 debut had long been rotated off the airwaves) named Nathalie Archangel.

“It Don’t Heal Clean” was the second basically-failed attempt at breaking a single from Archangel’s sophomore album Owl, this time on “alternative” leaning AOR stations like Live 105, after failing to generate much traction on Adult Contemporary playlists with the album’s leadoff track “So Quiet, So Still”. Both songs, and arguably the rest of Owl too, fall into that nether zone in between the two formats, occasionally bridged at the time by a veteran artist like R.E.M. or Sting, but easy for emerging acts to get swallowed up by. Too edgy to sit comfortably next to “Everything I Do I Do For You” but not enough to neatly segue into “Give it Away”, Archangel’s brainy, icy, but tuneful brand of pop was probably a victim of more precise demographic sorting, as Modern Rock radio was itching to purge anything too clearly grown-up to make a serious bid for the ears of the first echo boomers approaching teendom, while AC was more interested in courting their parents with familiar artist brands than breaking newer talent.

I responded to “It Don’t Heal Clean” instantly. I loved its synth groove, its foreboding minor chord patterns that part for a glorious moment in the bridge, its vaguely inscrutable lyrics, and of course Archangel’s piercingly clear vocals. While in her full-throated mode I bet her emitted frequencies come closer to the shape of a square wave than just about any other singer’s, which may not sound like a compliment, but is intended to convey that she doesn’t sound quite like anybody else I’ve heard.  I was primed to enjoy the song when the DJ mentioned that it was produced by one eighties star finding it increasingly difficult to straddle the widening Modern Rock/Adult Contemporary gorge, but whose music had been hugely influential in shaping my teen taste: Howard Jones. Even though the station hacked off the introductory vocal duet between Jones and Archangel over piano and (I think) viola, you definitely can hear his imprint, not just in the brief call-and-response section late in the song, but in those irresistible keyboard parts, and in the overall production itself.

I can’t even remember if “It Don’t Heal Clean” lost its contest that evening, but I don’t think I ever heard the song on the radio, or anywhere I didn’t press play on it, again. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I discovered the full Owl CD in a record store’s $2 cutout bin and instantly snapped it up as the bargain of the decade. I found the rest of Archangel’s songs here almost as thrillingly unique and compelling as my favorite, though it took several spins for me to warm up to some of them. Track 2, “My Older Lover” was produced by Don Was, hot from his success with Bonnie Raitt. He ran with the Four Seasons-homage flourishes in Archangel’s songwriting, enlisting Frankie Valli to sing it with her. It’s probably an impossible song to market to a straight 18-year-old guy, but I soon loved it too.  “A Very Thin Line”, produced by Dean Parks, is probably the most sonically straightforward of the set, but I’ve grown fond of it as well, as it outshines most condescending attempts by pop stars to sing about poverty.

The other eight songs were produced by Greg Penny, who’d worked with Sparks, Rickie Lee Jones and k.d. lang, and would soon become Elton John’s go-to guy. I don’t know if it was he or Archangel who instigated the delicate pizzicato of “To Last Me a Lifetime,” the pomp and elegance of “Married Man,” the emotional key change in “Move You To Tears,” or the striking arrangements on the other tracks. All eleven together feel like an exquisitely complete package of songs about searching and longing, and I credit that to Archangel’s writing and performance above all. She’s the kind of songwriter who clearly values the notes and the flow of her creations at least as much as the lyrics; though the latter are certainly unique and expressive, and sometimes extremely ornate, they don’t seem to push the melodies as much as they travel harmoniously with them. The one possible exception is the wonderfully wordy and strange “Life… When the Oracle Is Disproved,” which closes the album in a hail of anguish. This is not easy listening.

There certainly are moments (in songs like “Move You To Tears” and “To Give it All For Love” perhaps most notably) that sound dated today. We tend to think of the music of 1991, whether its grunge, its hip-hop, its shoegaze, its electronica, or even its Slint, as setting the template for nineties music and, perhaps more importantly, digging the grave for any music that sounds characteristically like the eighties. But the army of undertakers didn’t arrive all-powerful and all at once. A lot of music released the year I graduated from high school sounded and felt much more like 1988 than 1993 or, and not everybody thought that was such a bad thing.  And Owl isn’t an artist stuck in any kind of rut; it’s at least a leap or two beyond the bouncy technopop found on Archangel’s 1987 self-titled debut, or the song she contributed to Bette Midler’s 1990 album Some People’s Lives, which after going double-platinum probably provided Archangel with a bigger payday than the rest of her music career combined.

After releasing two flop albums for two different major labels (her debut was Columbia and Owl was MCA), Archangel fell so far off the musical map that by 1994 pretty much her only mention in the music press was a Spin Magazine article on another L.A. publication aimed at the coffeehouse scene, in which she was briefly quoted after being described as “a singer working behind the bar at Anastasia’s Asylum in Santa Monica”. Her songs were left unmentioned in the article, and soon enough she was pursuing a career as a nurse practitioner. At this time she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article, although she has recently begun releasing music again, having released a pretty good dance album, The Prettier Things, in 2019 and a better country album, Revel, with Nineteen Hand Horse, in 2020. (A follow-up album to Owl called Raven was recorded and released sometime in the 1990s or 2000s, though there’s scant and conflicting information out there about exactly when.)

I picked this album as my carte-blanche prize for being one of the top predictors of the results of the 1999 bracket (until the last week or so). I did so after listening to over a hundred other 1991 albums that I thought might add something to this tournament, but none of them dissuaded me from choosing this album that I’ve drawn so much enjoyment from over the decades, and I hope its inclusion can create a few more Nathalie Archangel fans. She is here because she’s got what it takes to be real, in her words and my opinion.

-- @hellonfriscobay