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! Unless you're one of the very few artists who thrive on constant reinvention (that would be David Bowie, The Beatles and Prince), it's h...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @tomewing 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! The Orb had a reputation - you’ll find this hard to believe, I’m sure - as stoner music. I remember queueing up for a midnight signing at Tower Record...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @bainard 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! The Reading band do plenty to distinguish themselves from fellow shoegazers Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine (who both had monumental rel...

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 melod...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @JamieLanger 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! The first album I heard by Kelly Willis was 1999’s What I Deserve back in 2014. Lee Ann Womack had released a fantastic album called The Way I’m Li...

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...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @bsglaser 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 Would Mike Watt Do (WWMWD)? It’s not a ridiculous question—there are worse ways to orient yourself to the world. Watt is and remains forthright a...

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 s...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @enkohl for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, and the second for Front 242's terrific album. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks! It might surprise the casual listener to note that Belgian EBM act Front 242 had already been in the game...

Hey, look at this: some original writing by me! This is my latest Designated Cheerleader for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. Please give it a read, and hop on over to @bestalbum95 on Twitter to participate in the tournament. Thanks! Front 242 are from Belgium. That’s not necessarily important. But with their martial beats, accented ...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jays_ear 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! Every once in a while, you come across an album and you listen to it and you think, holy shit, they made this just for me! The thing is I don’t really...

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! If you were over the age of 13 and alive in 1992 (yes, it's a 1991 album, but it didn't break big on radio and MTV until 1992), you probably don't n...

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”)...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @sammadams 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'm performing my cheerleading here, so I'll start off saying that this is one of my all-timers, and may be the album that was most responsible for g...

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! Enya wasn’t cool. Enya was a punchline for so long, and for the most boring reasons: because your aunt — the one who got really into tea after h...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @PerlzFromRobbie 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! Into The Great Wide Open can easily get lost in Tom Petty’s deep catalog. It comes in between two of his greatest albums – 1989’s Full Moon Fev...

The following piece is actually two pieces. The first was written for its induction into the Muriels Hall of Fame (RIP Muriels, you had a good run), while the second was added to Letterboxd as an addendum. I considered trying to rewrite both pieces into a complete whole, but both laziness and the suspicion that it couldn't be done with...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jamesbbeard for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, and the second for Julian Cope's PEGGY SUICIDE. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Also, there's a trivia question at the bottom. Thanks for reading! Up until Peggy Suicide, Julian Cope was ...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jjkamensky for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, the first of two about Julian Cope's PEGGY SUICIDE. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks! I bought Peggy Suicide off a five-star Rolling Stone review and I haven’t listened to it in over...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @sipologyblog 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! In Hip Hop, conversations about greatest MC of all time are always contentious, but when it comes to Hip Hop producers, there seems to be more agr...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by Cliff Hicks a.k.a. @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! While they may have made some major missteps along their long career, there's no denying that Chicago's Smashing Pumpkins knew what...

By request (and a great request it was!), here is a master list not only of the 128 titles in the Best Album of 1991 tournament (and by seed), but also a master list of the Designated Cheerleaders written for the various albums. If there's a link, that link should lead to an already-published DC; if there is no link, then that DC exist...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @bentclouds for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. Below is the cover for Geto Boys' single "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" from the album; the original cover was graphic enough that I thought it best to replace it. I hope you enjoy the piece, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the ...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @JasonJasons23 for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. Below is the cover for Geto Boys' single "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" from the album; the original cover was graphic enough that I thought it best to replace it, especially since there will be another Geto Boys DC sent to you after t...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jpjameshansen 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 was pretty sad to see Hal get this year’s Choking Victim award, though not totally surprised. I know you’re going to vote for Nirvana. Hal is…p...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @JustinWCornell 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! Out of all the albums released in 1991, Nevermind is the one whose influence has lingered the most. What has endured about this album after 30 y...

The following is a Designated Cheerleader for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, which starts today! Soon after this, you'll receive two more DCs from Best Album readers: one for Nirvana's NEVERMIND, and another for this Hal Ketchum record. Thanks for reading, and enjoy! 1992. In college, I fell for a girl. A girl who liked, among othe...

(The following was written for the 2010 Muriel Awards as an appreciation of that year’s Best Cinematic Moment, the incinerator scene from TOY STORY 3. I made a few small edits to the original when I posted it to Letterboxd, and I made a few more small edits before publishing it here. A number of you have probably read this before; my a...

Hello everyone! Welcome to my... newsletter? Blog? I'm not entirely sure what it is, actually. I'm going to embrace that ambiguity. I have a number of distinct interests, that sometimes overlap, but usually do not. Under normal circumstances, if I wanted to write about these different interests, I'd set up different venues for each -- ...