various artists - Mojo Presents: The Dreamers (15 Tracks Of Kate Bush-Inspired Dream Pop)

I don't have the October 2014 issue around which to contextualize the claim, but can one truly say this collection is Kate Bush-inspired? This stretches the definition of what "dream pop" is, and I always found Kate Bush (who I love...don't get me wrong) to be more akin to Peter Gabriel on the art rock tip, so I'm casting a gimlet eye towards the title. But there's a Wye Oak song here, and one by Julie Holter, and I can always skip over The War On Drugs, so I guess I'll just throw this one out to you, my people, and wish you not only a happy Mojo Monday, but a solemn Memorial Day.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Bloodclot

I have no clue how I ended up with this compilation.

Was it the name? Did I misidentify this as a mid-70s roots reggae comp? Or a tribute to Cro Mags' vocalist John Joseph? The cover is giving me mid-90s SoCal punk graphic design. The cover photo reminds me of the kind I'd have taken outside a showspace I went to in Baltimore back around this time. Maybe that's it...maybe, whenever I nabbed this one, I took a wag because maybe I thought it had some deepish cut Orange County tracks, the kind that I've been enjoying digging because I couldn't bother listening to it when it was new.

This is not that. This has two of the most ubiquitous songs of 1998 on it, with "The Rockefeller Skank" and "One Week" both popping up on the front end of this HITS radio sampler. The selections from K's Choice and Spacehog are not the songs that played everywhere. I didn't own either of these records, so it was interesting hearing what their respective labels were positioning as singles. Truth be told: the most interesting songs come on the back half of the CD, with Rufus Wainwright, Emm Gryner, and Dimitri From Paris all making appearances. It's capped off with that one MxPx song that I remember the video from, a pretty solid pop punk track from a band that hailed a ferry ride away from my current home base.

Discogs

Click here to download.

various artists - Macro Dub Infection Volume One

Before I fanboyed out of Lee Perry and King Tubby and Scientist, this was what I thought of when I thought of dub. Less associated in my brain with reggae at that time than as a confluence of many branches of electronic music, I was more familiar with Bill Laswell and Spring Heel Jack at that time. And "Macro Dub Infection Volume One", which I first encounted in the back pages of my buddy's CaseLogic binder, is the key reason why.

I love how broadly defined dub is here. This is a distinctly British endeavor, featuring names like Mad Professor, Laika, 4hero, and the Disciples. The Yanks make a couple of appearances: it's the first time I ever heard Tortoise, and Laswell performs under his illbient Automaton banner. This was also probably the first time I had come across Tricky. "Maxinquaye", "Nearly God", and "Pre-Millenial Tension" were such huge records for me in the late 90s, and this was my first exposure to his genius. There are even surface outliers like COIL and Scorn present, though a dive into their tracks provides the context that, yeah, they belong here.

Released on Virgin in the UK and Caroline in the States, it was nice turning up a copy for $3 at Value Village over the summer and nudging me to really dig back into my mid-90s electronic collection. And apologies for any stray tagging here; I would have gone back and corrected with a fresh upload, but I also downgraded my copy on my hard drive to a 128kbps version and stored the CDs. And most folks I know would trade incomplete tagging for a high sample rate.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Portishead - Live on Later...With Jools Holland, 15 April 2008

Beth Gibbons, Portishead, "Later...With Jools Holland"

Jesus. 10 years since the last Portishead release. 13 years since their last full-length. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley are making soundtracks and guesting on other folks' records. I can only imagine what Beth Gibbons is up to; I hope it's something involving her, some folk songs, and an English cliffside. The magic, the mystery of how and when they make music. There's very little like it in this world.

Listening to a Portishead record for me is a bit like reading a Bible is to others. Seeing them live is church. It's a worship of sound, a spiritual experience unlike few others I've had. I'd see them anywhere, but I feel like the best would be to see them in a deconsecrated space, to keep with the metaphor. Give a holy sound a proper venue.

"Third" came out April 2008. I remember it being a really odd time, an odd sense of doom and hope permeating the air. The first single from Portishead in 10 years, "Machine Gun", had debuted a couple months ahead of the full-length; I think it was one of the last times I went to Pitchfork for any music news. It sounded like the end of world to me. I couldn't wait for the whole deal.

I wouldn't get "Third" right away, but I was more than satisfied by the group performing live on "Later...With Jools Holland" the week the new record came out. They played two cuts: "The Rip" and "We Carry On". Some soul during the heyday of music blogs kindly ripped both performances to MP3 for me; I share them here. These are, by far, my favorite versions of each song. "The Rip" sounds even more ethereal, Barrow's drums so thin and ghostly. "We Carry On"...it's a song that makes me want to run through walls, its motorik beat, slapped against metal, and Silver Apples-style keyboards offset by guitar that plinks and then EXPLODES! I can't hear it without imagining a music video, directed preferably by Ben Wheatly, of medieval soldiers, muddy from head to toe, fighting and dying.

There should be a new Portishead record in 2021, is what I'm saying.

Click here to download.