JohnnyoftheWell
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SPUT ROYALE: Round 3 Group B

Hello welcome to this OFFICIAL TOURNAMENT of Sputnik's most popular artists! The committee (JustJoe, minushuman, budgie, Bedex, me) have watched the results of Rounds 1 and 2 with b a t e d breath and, um, now it's Round 3. Yikes. Please vote! Here is how to vote: submit a full ballot of ALL ten match-ups. Blanks are acceptable. The winners will go through to the next round, the losers will be forgotten forever (any tie-breakers will be announced separately). This will continue until there is one winner. Fun!
1David Bowie
Low

1. David Bowie vs. Kendrick Lamar

WINNER - David Bowie (38 votes)

King David Bowie did it all. He did the music and he did the acting and he did the Twin Peaks Teapot Effigy. He did it well. People remember this. Just last year a book came out under the title “Why Bowie Matters.” Shit the bed! This was neither the book we deserved nor the one we wanted (that title being the upcoming graphic novel “David Bowie and the Childhood Politics of Street Hockey”, written by Howard Sanchez and illustrated by Alicia Keys), but it should be enough for now. What a fucking legend.
2Kendrick Lamar
DAMN.

1. David Bowie vs. Kendrick Lamar

15 votes

Recent beef with Taylor Swift notwithstanding, it’s very nice to hear Kendrick Lamar sing again.
3Danny Brown
Atrocity Exhibition

2. Danny Brown vs. Tim Hecker

WINNER - Danny Brown (22 votes)

Danny Brown is a survivor and a dark horse. Knocking Agalloch out of the contest by one vote in Round One and running a close race with Oceansize in Round Two, he's suddenly prompting important questions about this site and what it treasures and what it *is*, all out of nowhere! Whether or not he'll stick around to answer them remains to be seen, but take nothing for granted with this man…
4Tim Hecker
Ravedeath, 1972

2. Danny Brown vs. Tim Hecker

18 votes

Oh my goodness, how do you meme Tim Hecker? He’s one of the only people here who comes across like a fucking professional. The dude has a PhD on urban noise and he’s collaborated with literally every artist whom the consensus says you must take seriously. Destroy him and you destroy yourself. I give up. He has already won.
5Fiona Apple
When the Pawn...

3. Fiona Apple vs. The Knife

16 votes

One of the very few artists in the ring with a voice that actually matters outside of this site, we need Fiona Apple more than she needs us. With a hornet’s nest of lyrical stingers and a jazz pop vocabulary for the ages, she has unsurprisingly alienated herself from the entirety of everyone pissed off at music that does not feature guitars and is written and performed by women significantly smarter than them. Her odds of overall victory on this site may be nil as such, but watch and see how far she continues to stave off the inevitable.
6The Knife
Silent Shout

3. Fiona Apple vs. The Knife

WINNER - The Knife (21 votes)

The Knife are probably better than whatever you’re listening to right now, but they make it so obvious that are they really? They are to your headspace what life drawing is to your house party, to sputelectronic what Fugazi is to sputpunk, to LordePots what Yellowcard is to SowingSeason. They are everything. One minute they hit you with a sugary earworm, the next it’s 19 minutes of near-silence. They can please all parties but, with more than a few contrarian twists up their sleeves, will they?
7Thrice
The Artist in the Ambulance

4. Thrice vs. Women

WINNER - Thrice (24 votes))

Our returning champions have made steady progress thus far, but their momentum isn't what it once was. Struggling to command a decisive margin against either buttprog cranium-in-chief Devin Townsend or the Long Island p**d*ph*l* gang Brand New, there's a lingering question of just who *can* they dominate in this day and age? Still dignified after all these years, Thrice are a reminder to us all that there's a long way to fall when you reach the top. They just don't seem ready to look down yet.
8Women
Public Strain

4. Thrice vs. Women

22 votes

It sometimes seems strange that this band is called Women, but then you remember that their sound is made up of ultrapowerful impenetrable gloom that will be forever admired but never understood by their fanbase and it suddenly makes perfect sense. Keep reaching, team!
9Ichiko Aoba
0%

5. Ichiko Aoba vs. Melt-Banana

12 votes

Ichiko Aoba is a mystical fairy queen, and like all good queens she carries an aura of cleanliness and purity. Hers is so strong that it helped drain Sputnik’s swamp of miasmic prog metal awfulness by eliminating Dream Theater and Between the Buried and Me from this noble competition. The latter of these made significant headway, but Ms. Aoba survived by virtue of being a floaty, floaty lady. There’s no sewage in her shoes, but will she ever go from floating to (um) flying? Let’s see!
10Melt-Banana
Bambi's Dilemma

5. Ichiko Aoba vs. Melt-Banana

WINNER - Melt-Banana (19 votes)

“Weepin' Doupin' guys fade out / one by two I smash the piles”

As you know by now, the true objective of this stupid competition is to arrange as many stupid pairings of artists as possible. Melt-Banana are the only surviving act wayward enough to look like a stupid pairing no matter who would put them with. By this virtue and their sheer quantity of decibels, they deserve to win. There is no argument, only volume. Good luck disputing that, science nerds.
11Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Henry's Dream

6. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds vs. Slowdive

20 votes

Pop culture has a lot on vampires and how emaciated and pallid they get if left to bad habits, but it’s only recently that this mythos has given us a view of what happens when they straighten things out, find a nice human girl to marry and hunker down with a freshly family. Did Nick Cave cause Twilight? I honestly don’t know, but he did cause many people to vote for him. Perhaps that is enough.
12Slowdive
Pygmalion

6. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds vs. Slowdive

WINNER - Slowdive (21 votes)

Slowdive making it this far has settled one thing: goodbye My Bloody Valentine (RIP Round 1 - Round 1). The best original shoegaze band has brought light and love and lava lampshades into literally every bedroom in the world, and since y’all can’t get enough of your parents’ spare bedrooms I guess it’s natural that these guys are dead ringers for top-grade Sput champions. Peace out.
13Rolo Tomassi
Cosmology

7. Rolo Tomassi vs. The Mars Volta

WINNER - Rolo Tomassi (24 votes)

You will die and Rolo Tomassi will bury you. Or, Rolo Tomassi will die and you will bury them. It’s a simple choice but the stakes could hardly be higher - and that’s by the standards of a post-prog-mathcore-rock band who lived and died by high stakes to begin with! What’s it gonna be, huh?
14The Mars Volta
Amputechture

7. Rolo Tomassi vs. The Mars Volta

18 votes

One of the most hotly tipped and enduringly celebrated will-they-or-won’t-they arcs of the ages, I find it incredible how much traction the Mars Volta generated with their quest to successfully write a song. The politics of possibility are strong here. Stooges everywhere.
15Shai Hulud
That Within Blood Ill-Tempered

8. Shai Hulud vs. Isis

8 votes

There is a five year gap between Shai Hulud’s three most recent albums, but a seven year gap between their latest and this contest. If that isn’t a definitive indication that they’re tipped as serious contenders to win this whole thing, goodness knows what is; they’ve been holding their own impressively for a band whose hype has mostly simmered lately, so who knows how far they can go from here.
16Isis
Oceanic

8. Shai Hulud vs. Isis

WINNER - Isis (34 votes)

Isis’ biography was the final one to be completed for this competition. What this tells us is: nobody wants to write about Isis. I’ve lately been reading up on the research process behind the South Korean drama-comedy “Crash Landing on You” and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of attention the producers apparently paid to the testimony of North Korean defectors in their portrayal of that setting. The show is pretty mediocre, but I suppose it’s quite interesting and important. Isis were a great band.
17mewithoutYou
Brother, Sister

9. mewithoutYou vs. Unwound

19 votes

Voting in an active popularity contest for a band currently going through the process of unsuccessfully breaking up feels like a veiled insult, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped you! mewithoutYou are special because C.S. Lewis and unique because G*d. People are bad at deciding what genre they are and worse at interpreting their lyrics beyond superficial mental health and/or apocalypse references. Time to make your minds up!
18Unwound
Leaves Turn Inside You

9. mewithoutYou vs. Unwound

WINNER - Unwound (23 votes)

The majority of Unwound’s discography is a masterpiece of negative energy that hisses and sparks like a leaky battery of awesome misanthropic competence. Negative energy is stronger than positive atmosphere because, in the broad scheme of mankind, more people have died than will be born, and you know this because Phoebe Bridgers (RIP Round 1 - Round 1) sort-of made a song about the end of the line. Facts and logic side with Unwound.
19Bjork
Vespertine

10. Bjork vs. Portishead

WINNER - Bjork (24 votes)

Let’s face it, as much as you all fawn over Nature Trip-Goddess Bjork-sama, none of you would last 5 minutes alone with her. Beings as fiercely eccentric as Bjork only survive as long as she has by assimilating every trivial disparagement and major attempted assault visited on them by the forces of order and spite. At this point, Bjork is surely ready to letterbomb the whole of London to the ground. Think you’re better than the rest of her netizen audience? Never made a kookiness slur under your real IP? Good luck!
20Portishead
Dummy

10. Bjork vs. Portishead

22 votes

Portishead is an underrated town on the Bristol Channel. My friend once went paintballing there aged 13. This was a directly framed means of cementing social hierarchy within his year group. He was on the losing side. One of his favourite songs at the time was “Mysterons.” He has since drifted from Portishead and no longer lives in the West Country, but he’s down with Billie Eilish’s Bond theme. All roads really do lead to Rome.
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