Facebook post (23 November 2022)

Note: I'm sharing this due to some renewed attention on Twitter. It isn't by any means as thorough as it would have been had I known this was to happen. 

"(Some of) THE MOST UNDERRATED ALBUMS EVER

This is a list I've just done of what I feel are some of the most 'underrated' albums by major artists. By 'underrated' I do not necessarily mean most unfairly overlooked as such, I mean albums that genuinely have a mixed or poor reputation, at least critically, and that I think shouldn't. This is all made up on the spot tonight so inevitably it'll miss off some (read: countless) favourites but I just wanted a writing opportunity.

So, from A-Z then:

BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE - MEGATOP PHOENIX (1989)

Basically any album of theirs that isn't the debut is critically neglected, but that seems especially mournful when it comes to this mid-period opus, my favourite record Mick Jones ever did. As an acid house-informed concept album celebrating the exaltation of modern London, dotted with telling sampled cutaways of found sound and film, it perhaps foreshadows Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha.

BLOC PARTY - INTIMACY (2008)

Insincerely mistrusted in its day simply because it was the third album by a band whose initial hype from a few years earlier had systematically subsided. Pity, because it's the accomplished, venturesome and diverse album the band were always destined to make. "Ares" and "Mercury" exist at the dazzling, rowdy meeting point between "Peek-a-Boo" and "Setting Sun" (two of my favourite songs ever), while "Signs" imbues post-minimalism with gothic dusk.

DAVID BOWIE - BLACK TIE WHITE NOISE (1993)

Not his best since Scary Monsters, but Low. An up to the minute, rhythmically supple, perfectly executed mingling of swingbeat, house and other 1993 musics, gelled by a re-energised, suited pop fountainhead, who synthesises his genepool of music as well as he ever did. The moving, yet banging "Jump They Say" - second only to "Be My Wife" as my favourite Bowie single - sums it all up best, but the cryptically menacing "Pallas Athena" and the genuine jubilance of "The Wedding" are other reasons why this would be no. 3 on my Bowie album rankings.

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS - WE ARE THE NIGHT (2007)

The unforgettable soundtrack to my 2007 Corfu holiday. Had Fatlip and Sammy the salmon never met, we might have been looking at a better-received album, because who could ignore vast, high-voltage chapels like the title track or "Saturate" or "A Modern Midnight Conversation". They noticed and realised the potential of bigroom electro house by feeding it krautrock smarts and stomach-twisting melody. It all culminates on their 2010 masterpiece Further.

THE CLASH - CUT THE CRAP (1985)

A radioactive punk sound collage, the neon younger brother of Mark Stewart's As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade. Dissonant and layered to its last breath and yet compellingly flat sounding, it helped (with B.A.D.) light up a hyperactive route for the likes of Pop Will Eat Itself and Age of Chance, and years later, if you squint, PC Music and Max Tundra. "This Is England" is the best Clash song of all.

THE CURE - THE TOP (1984)

The best and most repeatedly rewarding of their relatively unappreciated LPs. Genuine psychedelia of the lopsided, delirious kind, sometimes too drunk to stand, sometimes smitten with the minutiae of the moment. Often playing like Kiss Me x3 in miniature, it's all about blurry, sickly purples and oranges bleeding into each other, and the late Andy Anderson was a fine drummer, capable of military snares ("The Empty World"), tribal juggernauts ("Give Me It"), eastern crawls ("Wailing Wall") and everything between.

DAFT PUNK - HUMAN AFTER ALL (2005)

An unforgiving, brutalist concept album about autistic depression, and last year I wrote 3,200 words on why that is. It's the Brass Construction template taken to an uncomfortable extreme, chanting and repetition as coping mechanism, unwavering minimalism as private breakdown.

EARTH, WIND & FIRE - HERITAGE (1990)

This is one where I suspect ultimately it may just be me, as this isn't really EWF playing to any of their recognised strengths. But never mind that because if you have a weakness for old R&B stars losing themselves in the new jack swing blanket then there is plenty to really take to here. While not exactly innovative, it can be fascinating to hear outsiders to a certain, intricate style work out a way to mould themselves into its unusual shapes.

FLEETWOOD MAC - SAY YOU WILL (2003)

All it's missing - by and large - is Christine's touch, because for me this is second only to Tusk in terms of quality and sonic adventure. Typically minor-key things like "Thrown Down" and "Smile at You" are so gorgeous and made me realise I don't have nearly as much of a problem with Nicks' singing as I once thought I did, while "Murrow", "Red Rover" and "Come" are Lindsey in full on studio wizard mode. Every one of these 18 songs works.

GEORGE HARRISON - WONDERWALL MUSIC (1968)

Crystalline and enigmatic, always surprising and full of quiet pathos and wonder, and it has "Dream Scene" on it. What more could you ask for?

JAMES - WHIPLASH (1997)

Wah Wah, their largely improvised, limited edition 1994 album, is in some ways their secret masterpiece, 69 minutes of Brian Eno-assisted technoid post-rock. But then came their next 'proper' album and lessons had been clearly learned; euphoric power-pop brushing soldiers with inventive, and rather unpredictable, electronica excursions like "Go to the Bank" and "Greenpeace", all joined at the hip by Tim Booth's gift for continuity.

KING CRIMSON - THREE OF A PERFECT PAIR (1984)

While I agree that many of the songs on the 80s KC albums are better live, that's quite irrelevant because they (along with Red) are my favourite King Crimson albums overall. Beat is probably less liked by fans but this one attracts more critical indifference, despite its eventful dialogue between twisted pop and outright experimental work. "Industry" is so good I ripped it off for one of my terrible songs back in 2018.

KRAFTWERK - ELECTRIC CAFE (1986)

One of their best strengths was how they put an incredibly human affection for human creations or the human imagination - trains, bikes, calculators, motorways, robots - on display, reminding you these things were born of real, ceaseless inspiration. So it continues here with the rhythmic fuck-all of side one, a tribute to dancing itself and who cares if by 86 it sounded in debt to Art of Noise. While over on side two, "The Telephone Call" was their best ever pop song.

LED ZEPPELIN - IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR (1979)

Probably the critically best liked of all these albums in some ways, but few of them get to the heart of it. This is, ahem, an album of Swedish Europop and informal worldbeat jams and all the better for it. It also helps that the final 13 minutes of the album, and their entire career - "All My Love" and "I'm Gonna Crawl" - are IMO the 13 greatest minutes of their whole career, a bittersweet synth-pop couplet that contrarian me says they were always building up to.

LINKIN PARK - A THOUSAND SUNS (2010)

Perhaps it's strange that I like an album by this band as much as I do. But like Muse, they do well when they indulge their Depeche Mode side and this has the added bonus of being in some ways their Kid A but in more ways their Dazzle Ships - war-darkened electropop songs interspersed with paranoid musique concrete-type interludes. And it genuinely works most of the time.

MADONNA - AMERICAN LIFE (2003)

The ultimate supposed 'midlife crisis' album is a disruptive, glitched up minor classic, where digital manipulation as aural representation of the singer's lapse in faith and breakdown in communication is as expertly realised as that on Neil Young's Trans, (eek) Kanye's 808s and George Michael's True Faith (the latter of which is the only of those still in need of drastic critical rehabilitation).

MANIC STREET PREACHERS - KNOW YOUR ENEMY (2001)

Now on the comedown from their sustained commercial peak, and with the backing to do it, they spew out one of their most ambitious and polystylist albums, where the noisy calls to arms can be anything from explosive ("Found That Soul") to exploded ("My Guernica"). And between all that, what unlikely half-buried gems are waiting to be heard - disco political satire, Murmur jangle, Nicky Wire droning to a drum machine like Mark E Smith, an attempt at Phil Spector that ends up like Pinkerton's Assorted Colours. A tree of many branches.

GEORGE MICHAEL - PATIENCE (2004)

Put on the naughty step by critics for being supposedly overlong and over-indulgent, a trap that blinded them to the magnificence of the sparkling microhouse jam "Precious Box" and The Ones-recontextualising elation of "Flawless (Go to the City)", among so much else on this relatively contented final album that followed so many years of personal turmoil.

MOBY - LAST NIGHT (2008)

His on-off public gaffes mean he's certainly not someone who helps anyone state his case, but whatever, because when I was 10 I played this album endlessly. In the middle of rave nostalgia from the Prodigy, M.I.A., Burial and Zomby, this terrific homage to late 80s/early 90s pop-rave, diva house and NY garage was and still is just the ticket. "Ooh Yeah", "I Like to Move in Here", "Everyday It's 1989" and "Disco Lies" - not far from the stuff disco infernos are made from.

GILBERT O'SULLIVAN - I'M A WRITER, NOT A FIGHTER (1973)

Not that any of his albums get much of a critical look-in, but even so this one is largely dismissed. But why? It's not my go to Gilby album either but those cod-funk clothes really suit him, in a homely sort of way. Ditto "Not in a Million Years", which manages for once to be more offbeat musically than lyrically. And Gilbert knows all about offbeat lyrics.

PET SHOP BOYS - BILINGUAL (1996)

Neil's coming out album is suitably one where they don't give a fuck. Latin pop, and all the signifiers it gives British listeners, is the mood of the day and thus Cuban disco and Favre samba, among other touchstones, are deployed with total wit. Neil even raps! And rhymes Pinter with winter, and 'best effects' with 'Sex-O-Lettes'! Furthermore, the rhythmic exploration really works and few of their contemporaries had a final genuine crossover hit as happy as "Se a vida é".

PINK FLOYD - THE FINAL CUT (1983)

My favourite Floyd album of all, or at least my favourite album credited to Pink Floyd, and one of the most repeatedly disarming albums I can name you, a big jump into the deep end of contemporary British attitudes and Roger's place in all of that. It can be genuinely harrowing if it catches you at the right time, and "The Gunner's Dream" and "Two Suns in the Sunset" - the fallout from the post-war consensus being slowly atomised - will often be the songs when it does.

POP WILL EAT ITSELF - THE LOOKS OR THE LIFESTYLE? (1992)

A transitional album but a great one, filled with cautiously angry songs, leaving the positivity of 1990 behind for the pessimism of 1994's Dos Dedos Mis Amigos. "Harry Dean Stanton" comes over like a stunning inner-city raga.

THE PRODIGY - INVADERS MUST DIE (2009)

Partly their attempt to reclaim the wailing cartoon hardcore of Experience - my favourite album ever made by a 20-year-old? - it actually sounds closer to Erasure's awesome cover of "Voulez-Vous", of all things. Whatever, it's a near flawless album of harsh punk geometry that did, and still does, all that could be asked of it.

ROBERT PLANT - SHAKEN 'N' STIRRED (1985)

A rocker deciding to make an art pop album, but he has no idea how to exactly, so at its best it sounds deliciously off-kilter and startling. Was "Hip to Hoo" an attempt by OpenAI to create 80s pop? "Too Loud" on the other hand was Plant trying for David Byrne but ending up with a misshapen approximation of Yello. Just bonkers, all of it.

R.E.M. - UP (1998)

Even by their standards, this meek move is really introverted, which may be why someone likes myself takes to it so much. All those drum machines and rusty, analogue synths playing these gorgeously amorphous, open-ended lullabies. It's really, really ambient at times - so much so that songs can altogether slip away into the air (particularly on "Airportman", now there's an opening song to challenge a fanbase), and "Why Not Smile", "At My Most Beautiful", "Falls to Climb" and the clattering, Stereolab-ish "Hope" (ending delightfully with pure white noise) are like stomach butterflies.

CLIFF RICHARD - EVERY FACE TELLS A STORY (1977)

Insofar as there is any critical consensus on Cliff's albums. But this was in the Bruce Welch period and is frequently fabulous. There is a touch of the Brothers Gibb but not even that prepares you for "You Got Me Wondering", which would fit snugly into McCartney's Ram, and "When Two Worlds Drift Apart", one of the greatest songs basically ever, with chordal shifts and a nuanced, ever-shifting arrangement to die for. The 2002 CD is best for boasting "No One Waits", Cliff's best song full stop.

THE ROLLING STONES - BLACK AND BLUE (1976)

A band I like best when they sound their least Stonesy, but they only did two albums where their guard is down pretty much the entire time, firstly on the free-rock of Their Satanic Majesties and then, almost a decade later, this eclectic collection of ad-hoc jams and rhythmic workouts. They're not trying for anything major and it works entirely in their favour because nothing is ever so straightforward. In some ways its like Wings' Wild Life. In other ways it's like Radiohead's The King of Limbs.

THE SELECTER - CELEBRATE THE BULLET (1981)

A captivatingly glum portrait of 1981 UK civil unrest, and the mournfully dubby title track in particular is every bit the equal of "Ghost Town", with Barry Jones' trombone evoking Rico's most somnambulant moments. But you can still dance to it all.

SKIDS - JOY (1981)

I've yet to read a kind retrospective review of this outstanding album, which may be why I'm going to have to write one someday. Stuart Adamson may have already parted to found Big Country but it feels as though his former bandmates were one step ahead of him in the rustic reanimation stakes. A proud, open-hearted album of tradition, it is nevertheless brought to life through its spaciousness and structural smarts, the best Caledonian avant-rock folk album. "Iona" strangely evokes Peter Gabriel's "Biko" in its patient build, and "Fields" should have made the UK top five.

SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES - THE RAPTURE (1995)

An eleventh hour meeting with John Cale results in their most overlooked and therefore unusually rewarding work that aims for much and gets it all. "Not Forgotten" is there if you want to know how well they could still be (something like) their 1981 selves, and "O Baby" is the pick of the quirky light relief, but once it's got you it keeps you with the swirling, 11-and-a-half minute title track, which drones as much as it moves and takes you on a trip as far as that of Suzi Quatro's "Angel Flight" but still keeps so much concealed and unexplained.

STEVE MILLER BAND - CIRCLE OF LOVE (1981)

I'm not exactly a Steve Miller fan and I've not heard most of their albums. What I care about is this quickie album being mostly taken up by the phenomenal 18-minute "Macho City", a spiky avant-garde disco sierra that dares to become increasingly empty and reductionist in the most novel (and post-punk) way.

THE STYLE COUNCIL - CONFESSIONS OF A POP GROUP (1988)

Maybe it's too tempting to see this as the mirror image of Spirit of Eden in some ways? Anyhow, it's the ultimate, decimating final step in Weller's abandonment of rock before there was nowhere else to go but square one. The synth-funk half stands up remarkably well - particularly in its more kinetic moments - but the 'classical' side is poignant in its mirrored hallway of pauses, gasps and deep breaths, occupied by memories of the Swingle Sisters, Brian Wilson and Erik Satie.

SUEDE - HEAD MUSIC (1999)

The only bad song is Neil's "Elephant Man", which sounds like its come in from another album anyway. Otherwise this is a slinky record for twilight lounges. Even when Brett's infamously cocaine-crisp lyrics veer towards apparent self-parody, the expansive grooves take over, but what of"Asbestos", in which he still effortlessly writ everyday suburbia into a sky-wide daydream? Best of all is "Indian Strings", maybe the best thing they've done since 1997.

SUICIDE - AMERICAN SUPREME (2002)

It sounds like it was made in about 1992, Alan Vega seems to have slowed down to an early 00s Mark E Smith slur, the prismatic prog-house rhythms go on forever without many shifts in perception. And as if this wasn't tasty enough already, amidst it all are some particularly finely honed spears that remind you of its actual time, and its city, and its creators, and what all these things mean in proximity. An unsung triumph that awaits further inspection from those who stop at "Surrender".

TRAVIS - 12 MEMORIES (2003)

Travis? How easily people forget "Re-Offender", the moody lead single that abruptly halted their imperial phase but which is awfully pretty in its own obtuse way. I agree it's all a little heavy-handed - the entire album, that is - but even from the get-go (the rainy vaudeville of "Quicksand") there's more than plenty of different angles that together make the album strangely gripping.

U2 - POP (1997)

Get past the jammy red herrings "Discotheque" and "Do You Feel Loved" and what you've got is an engagingly troubled work, where the band - at their art rock best - shoot world-weary songs with multihued signs of life, the sound of grey stretched into a giant yellow arch. The increasingly bleak final 16 minutes are particularly downcast but utterly wonderful ("Velvet Dress" is ambient par excellence), while the acid techno-propelled "Mofo" is not their noisiest but their heaviest and densest, where a shoegaze guitar smog comes like a sierra during a panic attack.

ROBBIE WILLIAMS - RUDEBOX (2006)

Self-sabotage, Robbie dismisses it as these days, but what a way to go about it! Sprawling in its adventure, negotiating conference between the 80s and the 00s in the most unlikely ways, and ways there are many. So for every straight-up should-be-classic like "She's Madonna" or "Lovelight", there's askew declarations of love for his younger selves' favourite Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Beastie Boys and Sly & Robbie songs, to say nothing of funny, carefree cornball raps like "The 80s"/"90s" and "Good Doctor".

NEIL YOUNG - LANDING ON WATER (1986)

As though understudies of Einstürzende Neubauten had been tasked with making a pop album, this is a wonderfully wonky album of electronic, quasi-industrial rock. The drums beat everything else into submission and the rhythms are always distended and distorted, leaving the songs to sound all diseased and float around choppy EBM waters. There's a really compelling battle of purity and impurity at here that I wish I got more often from his work.

XTC - MUMMER (1983)

Once underrated even by me, as even though the two albums either side of it are among my favourite albums of all time, I have tended to forget about this wonderful little record in the middle. But it's a fantastic and not particularly 'transitional' classic, Steve Nye an ideal translator of the group's sparse thinking. It gets a mixed rep these days because I think critics feel they *have* to knock one XTC album down a few pegs (even though they don't), and this poor one with little public appeal is their lazy go-to.

Anyway, that's that (I'm getting some rest now)"

Daft Punk - Human After All (2005)

The long-term intention for Join the Dots was for me to gradually tell more personal stories, or at least inject more of my own experiences into the pieces. Really this was something I was doing from the outset, but my month-long unintended break, between the Crazy and I-Level reviews, was one of a lack of motivation and doubting of skills. It has depressed me that this blog isn't on Google for some reason (if you're reading this, or have read any other piece here, thanks for clicking the link!) and generally I am sad I haven't made the most of this time off uni to write, before I suddenly, sickeningly turn 24 in the second half of September. But I have so many albums I want to write about, basically, and so many ways I envision telling them. And while my spirit is back, for however long that might be, I wish to harness it. And I've wanted to present my case for an album that, you know, there's a good chance a lot of my friends have actually heard, which hasn't happened since The Big Express.

Which brings me to the curious case of the third Daft Punk album, which when released in March 2005 after a four-year wait was met with hostility from fans and critics bordering almost on feelings of betrayal. What happened to Discovery's inclusivity, and all that loving, dynamic pop, all that repurposed 'uncool' soft rock and prog made vital? What's with this short album of static and pointedly un-housey tracks that repeat their only few ideas endlessly and never go anywhere? And why are they so joyless, and grooveless? Reynolds' pan of Human After All seemed to sum up the consensus, on how this new direction was merely "an archly ironic dance-rock that feels desultory and numb – verging on autistic".

But actually, he directly, partly touches on one thing I think is true there, which is that I think people may have a better chance of understanding Human After All if they're, ah-hem, autistic and depressed. Oh, I know this sounds fanciful, but I'm speaking from experience. While I don't usually consider it among my favourite albums, I listen to it more than any others by Daft Punk. I play it often, in fact, as it seems to cater to certain temperaments of mine in a way that few other full albums do. HAA isn't wholly bleak, but when it is, it lands me in the deep end, speaks to certain realities I find close to home and frankly too evasive in other music. And the album's individual dedication to repetition? And sheer determination in reiterating its obsessions, partly out of comfort, but partly out of wishing it will eventually help it get somewhere? That goes over the heads of many, but not mine. This album's minimalism – the short but incessant way it goes about everything – is the perfect canvas, nay mirror, when I'm a certain way. The way Brass Construction would originally style an album was one of lengthy dance tracks where, rhythm being upfront, words were usually short, direct hooks or even chants, just non-specific enough to allow you to plug yourself in. Human After All is that template taken to one uncomfortable extreme.

(Then again, one thing I find slightly perplexing about the album's reception is that, if anything, its no-frills nature was rather linked with the duo's debut album, Homework, an album so dry and often pop-resistant, and which stays so dry for so long (it is much longer than Human After All), that it fits very aloofly into the rockwrite narrative of 90s dance classics. And it is, again, hardly a record free of threat; "Alive" is five minutes of pure tenseness, while the pure acid-into-the-red "Rollin' & Scratchin'" and "Rock'n Roll" were the 'unlistenable' tracks that casual listeners, drawn in by the videos to the hits, were known to skip, becoming in that sense to Homework what "It Doesn't Matter" and "Don't Stop the Rock" were to Dig Your Own Hole or, later, "Same Old Show" and "Don't Give Up" to Remedy).

When I was a bit younger, I used to think of Human After All as the "00s Electric Café"; other than them being famously divisive, 'cold' mid-career albums where hearty topics are looked at distantly, I'm not sure there's much to that comparison. Rather, I look at the sleeve of Human After All, that eerie CRT telly fuzzily displaying the duo's logo like a battered old VHS (the way a much younger me would be scared shitless by the Granada endcap or, to a lesser extent, the 90s BBC Video ident), surrounded by only pitch black (which continues into the rest of the artwork. Pure black on the back cover, disc, etc. with the exception of further images of this damn TV) and wonder why it wasn't people's first warning; it's coming at you like a broadcast from places you don't want to know about. 

The title track almost conceals its intensification through its drawn-out reiterations of the same basic theme. While the dissociate, very un-human voice perpetually tries convincing itself "we are human after all, much in common after all", by the end it has sunken to new lows, despairingly panting HU-MAN staccatos as it attempts to break from the rigid industrial clatter of the music that, in clear disagreement, is tightening the knot in 'its' heart. The use of extreme distortion to hide the pained singer trying to communicate as an aural representation of the boulders in their struggle is a lineage that goes through Trans, American Life and 808s & Heartbreak. Whereas apparently here, these robots are inhuman. And while I have no wish to crack myself open in a review of a Daft Punk album, it's just normal to me, with the dormancy I've felt for years in life and don't feel stopping any time soon, to automatically think of other people as 'proper people' and not myself. This is a harshly claustrophobic five minutes of music.

Compared to what comes next, though, it's just a setting of the stage. "The Prime Time of Your Life" is, as the reddest of all herrings, initially beatless and naked, mostly just fermenting guitar-synths trying to puke when there's nothing in the stomach. That name and refrain. The bladed reminder that despite everything I've missed my youth; my many attempts to get it jump-started, to have a life, be a young person and do young people things, only to be utterly prevented by insecurities, by no one being around, by being awful at start conversations with people who are not interested anyway, by an absence of confidence. And yet here's the bludgeoning aide-memorie - "Prime time of your life. Live it. Today." – deviously, ceaselessly stalking the mind to no end and to no good.

And why that beat? The pop swing of schaffel is 'meant' to be one of good times, the prime times of people's lives, in Daft Punk's universe going right back to glam rock and "Hot Love" and more recently to 2005 the bedrock of Rachel Stevens and Goldfrapp's finest singles, hits from my actual prime time. Here the track just chews up the schaffel with its chipped robot teeth into a poison akin to Christian Morgenstern's "Gem Club". And then "life" jams, the whole "song" boundlessly accelerating with increasing electric fencing and white noise voltage as all the atoms split (PCP's "We are from Frankfurt" or Moby's "Thousand" via the burning interface of Cybersonik's "Jackhammer") until there is rendered nothing but a horrifying, butchering spit – here's what you can do with your directionless prime time platitudes, everyone – before finally detonating into a huge silicon nothing, leaving you in the huge blackness that envelopes the artwork. Because that what it gets like, when you just can't come to terms with 'it'. And this is of course without even considering the Tony Gardener video, and what this could all mean to someone else on the tether's end.

Recognising that it's shot its sharpest bolt, the album immediately retreats into "Robot Rock". As anyone will point out, yes, it's essentially a four second loop of Breakwater's "Release the Beast" looped into infinity with less than the bare minimum of embellishment (just the spoken song name). But as a lead single it's daringness has gone underappreciated – admittedly it would seem more radical giving the audience a momentary loop of a song they already all know, ergo forcing everyone to try hearing it anew, but where others see laziness I see a more innocent plunderphonica: two musicians feeling a direct kindred spirit in 1980 and letting it encroach their own fabric uninterrupted, a spirit furthered by it being rendered at its core a dumb garage rock groove, strutting its stuff like "You Really Got Me". Or, more accuaretly, "Take Me Out", remixed by Daft Punk utilising an infamously hands-off approach a year earlier; if anything, the clinical road to Human After All publicly began there.

But I also think of Ferry Corsten's crossover hit "Rock Your Body Rock", also released in early 2004 and similarly a Now 57 favourite of mine, and clock how its vocoder refrain, noisy electro surfacing and trashy charm also envisaged "Robot Rock" on the horizon, and I consider what it is to be a track that, even for Human After All, most people find way too long (most people would cut it off where the radio edit ends) whereas I don't. Rocking back and forth to music, something I've always done, something my parents were told when I was diagnosed with Asperger's that I would soon grow out of but haven't and never will. It moves but it never moves; plus, I rarely find cyclical songs outstay their welcome. I could say the same about the "Steam Machine", which seems to use rocking more as a coping mechanism. A clenched-teeth refrain breathing down your neck and over chromised squelches, ultra-processed like dangerous, fenced-off power sources, or like "Da Funk" with the panics. From afar it might sound like a party, up close its decaying at the seams, and though the odd discursion is glimpsed – breaking up the riff into a swing rhythm, or a momentary Mantronix-type cut-up – it largely stays shelled up and detached. 

"Make Love" has studied smooth soul and Philly, analysed timeless love songs and forced a perceived grasp of their essence, but has never come close to romance itself; it loves 'love' in theory but doesn't understand how to harness it. So it just sits on the edge of the world playing these soft funk licks, these muffled Barry White signifiers, to its disquieted self while looking out aimlessly and forlornly at the world. It's Peter Skellern's "Hold on to Love" or Marvin's Let's Get It On abandoned forever in Joy Division territory. It's Liquid's "Sweet Harmony" sans any sweet harmony. Where "Digital Love" had writ unrequited love into a thousand explosive colours, giving its lovelorn robot a sci-fi super-reality, the sort of track to make people's hearts stop, all "Make Love" does is catatonically watch the lovers entwined pass it by, over and over. It's "Digital Love" battered into submission, tired of waiting.

Really, the true link between the two records is Together's "So Much Love to Give", Bangalter's 2002 collaboration with DJ Falcon and the best thing either of them ever did, where the vivaciousness of "Digital Love" still survives but the private act of unending repetition has already taken its hold. Say 'I've got so much love to give' once and it's ambitious. Say it a million times, however, and its beyond desperate. Say it a million times, set it to bleeding waves of filter-house and it'll still sound beyond desperate, but now also heartbreaking. The Freeloaders' cover, which debuted inside the UK Top 10 the same week "Robot Rock" blinked a disinterested peak at number 32, should have taken note of that rather than at certain junctures resolve both the music and the sample ("...to you!") to give it a happy ending. The Together original may even have one too, but just as with "Make Love", it fades out too soon for anyone to tell.

But the Freeloaders – one of those flashy, Freemasons/Meck/Hi_Tack-style outfits – outselling singles by Bangalter's main project scratches a blatant truth which is the continued growth of Daft Punk's already huge impact on pop; no longer did stuff have to sound 'like' DP to mark them as a clear inspiration. The riffage of Bodyrockers' top three hit from the following week, "I Like the Way" (a sort of slimy old man version of Deep Dish's gorgeous and stylish "Flashdance", also a top three hit seven months earlier), makes it plainer, likewise LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House", which went Top 30 just before the album was released. So Human After All's dance-rock crunch couldn't be more 2005, the year that epitomised the American-European garage melting pot of post-punk and dance, bands and DJs, that had been in currency since electroclash, mashups and the DFA (and the parallel New Rock and what not).

Inevitably, most of Daft Punk's fellow late 90s, album-oriented, rock canon-friendly peers were also in step: The Chemical Brothers' "Come Inside" and "The Big Jump", Fatboy Slim dusting off the old bass guitar for Palookaville, Moby doing similar things on his much-maligned Hotel, or the Prodigy breathing renewed vigour on "Girls" and the rather less renewed vigour on the still underrated parent album. Human After All, with its Soulwax-friendly dynamics and DIY-fetishising three week recording, could never wish to hide its communication with all this other music. But "The Brainwasher" is perhaps the most successful in that respect, with its increasing layers of attack and noise (as opposed to "Robot Rock" stillness) making it among the album's most accessible moments. Which isn't to say it's a departure from the record's overall picture – it still sounds isolated and moves itself along uneasily. But though 'the brainwasher' here can stand for anything, it's mostly magnetising fun, another chance for the album to express the joy of dancing or at least moving to music in your own little space.

Which I can't stress enough for me personally, as someone who has never even been to a nightclub. Not that I wouldn't go, but I've never been invited and don't have the courage to go alone. Which is the story of me and an outdoor life in general. Dance music, broadly speaking, is a deep, lifetime passion of mine, but as someone who stays isolated, with all my nearest friends still some 20 miles away in a big, scary city, music is overall a very personal part of my life, no matter how communal its intentions, or how much I warmly regard the idea of it being communal, and I only usually get to enjoy music with others in online discussions. Human After All, despite being rooted in house and despite its sonic picture being synonymous with the wider 2005, sounds – as if I hadn't made it obvious enough already – like it was meant for people that don't get to see other people all too often.

The album then abruptly does the opening of Zoo TV in reverse, starting with the channel-hopping collage ("On/Off") and then pressing with song-shaped study of telly and the masses. But "Television Rules the Nation" takes a look at the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's own similarly-named song, strips it of all its content but retains the industrial brickwork, leaving but a practically useless would-be-slogan, hammers and chisels, vomiting Homework synths and a lot of blankness. I do see how people would want to flesh these barebones, and its less personal, or personalised, 'subject' ensures a less personal strain (making it the odd song out, if anything has to be). Yet as peopleoids observing the space between the lines of real people, and being unable to process them in any meaningful way, it nails the article of "fear and paranoia" Thomas and Guy said they were reflecting just as much as anything else here.

The unexpected parallels to early 90s U2 continue with "Technologic", a sort of psycho-cybernetic cousin of "Popcorn" that reassembles memories of the Edge's "Numb" (intoned, curt commands) and the Beta Band's "Smiling" (helium-voiced, curt accusations) (although the cyber-speak here rather predicts the U2 of "Unknown Caller", closing the circle crudely). The near-incessant instructions from a pitched-up automaton to buy, use, break, fix, change, mail, upgrade... invite you to view it as some dark humour on the malaise of modernity, or suchlike. Whereas what is mostly it to me, someone who again can struggle in basic conversation, and who fears being given tasks where the cost is on others if I happen to fuck up at all, but the sometime inability to function under such circumstances? The deliberately off-putting video makes it obvious that, even though this is pop enough to pass as a single, it's not good times music.

Yet with "Emotion", a seven-minute daydream and sigh as the gradual fade of daylight starts to creep in through the window, the album slows down and wisely ends with tentative but crucial hope. Or at least that's how I choose to enjoy it right now (you can just as easily see it as a similarly one-minded sibling to "Make Love"). As per usual, your lot is just a single loaded word, repeated until feeling is unavoidable. It swells and rises, perhaps looking ahead or just having an epiphany about the minutiae of the present, and ensures the record closes by drifting into space (much like "Subterraneans" on Low; indeed both albums are riddled with parallels, Bowie near-wordlessly moving further away from the burning centre of that album until he's 'left every place', after all). And for what is a generally absolutionist album, it's a nobly inclusive ending. Except accusations that this album isn't inclusive really mean the album isn't dancefloor fodder. It, like Low (which in its day was chastised by some, notably Charles Shaar Murray, for not entirely unrelated reasons), aims to reach a lot of certain other people who don't readily come to mind to most listeners.

But audiences required the Alive 2006/07 tour for the tracks to make sense to them, to reveal their symmetry to all the duo had done before. They needed the introverted music to become an extroverted experience shared with everyone else (hence, Alive 2007 is considered a modern live masterwork by the same people who leave Human After All gathering dust, regardless of the strong overlap). Daft Punk took note. The next album, when it eventually arrived in 2013, was perhaps the only true example of an Event album in all my experience – something jointly anticipated by people from every part of my life: school friends, online friends, family members, the radio I'd hear, the writers I'd read. It was, of course, wildly popular, but in hindsight it feels like Daft Punk gradually shed everything that once defined them; first remixes, then live sets, then house music, then finally themselves. A prolonged shutting down where Human After All was frequently one captured in freeze frame.

I-Level - I-Level (1983)

A good few years ago, when listening to the 12" of I-Level's "Minefield" to the first time, a pretty much instant observation struck me. It sounded just like something off A.R. Kane's "i" album, which was released six years later in 1989. I don't mean just musically, or lyrically, but even Sam Jones as a singer, which really helped fill in some cracks I'm unsure have been all that widely observed before; i – a typically influential record that lights up even more routes for the 1990s than 69 – is known for absorbing house and clearer beacons of soul into the band's already finely-melded genepool, but Britfunk too? Yet it's right there, seeped into its kernel as much as anything. Soul II Soul and The Wild Bunch are usually seen as where the secret legacy of Britfunk had manifested itself by the decade's end, but their and i-era A.R. Kane's shared inclinations towards dub, soul and even jazz didn't get there from completely different places. 

All of I-Level, as an album, sounds remarkably prophetic in that respect, but it's also very much a record of its actual time. In recent years, Britfunk, being an ever resilient creature, had initiated a more explicit dialogue with American synth-funk and boogie than had been the case when Incognito or Beggar & Co. were still unassailable. A turning point may be Imagination's sterner productions or Central Line and Junior having some of their songs remixed for the American market and becoming briefly part of the fabric in underground New York, but by 1983 I-Level were an attractable proposition, a London trio whose funk would be as relevant at home as it would on American black radio. Their sound is a supple thing of space and pace; rather than the often vigorous, Lacy Lady tempos of Linx, Light of the World and other groups who got their start in the Ensign/Elite/etc days, I-Level sound like they've responded primarily to the recent ripples of "Forget Me Nots" or "A Night to Remember". They're never as frenetic.

Which only makes sense, as it's not 1980 anymore. But consider the histories of the players themselves; Duncan Bridgeman and Joe Dworniak had briefly recorded together as Shake Shake!, who released a much subdued punk-funk single with the same name for Tot Taylor's label in 1981, while Sam Jones had been a member of Brimstone, a roots reggae outfit who recorded for Grove Music and Lark and regularly played with Aswad. In other words, all three members bring spacious pedigree and this seems to particularly play out on their penchant for dub spaces; "Shake Shake!", for instance, has atonal synths echoing into its every backdropped leeway, while Brimstone's "Final Judgement" from 1978 is already heavy and bass-centric enough before the "Final Dub" on the flip, where incomplete vocals melt through in much the same timbre as on "Ire Feelings (Skenga)".

I-Level signed to Virgin, whose hitherto only Britfunk release was Hudson People's 1979 side "Boogie on Downtown", and their 1982 debut "Give Me", while making no showing at home, was a hit on the US R&B and Dance charts. The domestic 12" lays their inaugural template down; Sam's romantic odes to living the moment, orange nebulas of synthesiser, undemanding but undeniable slap bass and crisp electronic drums, components which together flow in and out of the subtle, glistening dancefloor fantasies they conjure together. The bleeping melody foresees Beck's "Dreams" by decades and even though the US mix by John Luongo is named a 'dub version' it's intriguing to hear how near-identical and full-blooded both mixes are. Finally a band of their kind barely needed to change to survive the Atlantic crossing. Plus, with only a few more minor alterations to the song you'll arrive at Sandy Kerr's disco sierra "Thug Rock", which samples it liberally (nay, swallows it undigested). Not that Britfunk needed Stateside approval, but it was a big deal when "Mama Used to Say" or "Walking Into Sunshine" blew up there, and so it would have been with "Give Me", a pat of confidence that if American discos like this stuff in its raw state you must be damn good.

Not that there was any guarantee of sustaining, or topping, this peak. They only had one more American club success and back home they sadly never managed a proper hit, etching the charts numerous times but never splintering the Top 40, while the album itself bottomed out at number 50; attention would ultimately shift to their likeminded peers Loose Ends, who cruelly enough were also on Virgin. Had more fans of "Give Me" being paying attention they would have found the remaining songs on I-Level expand on its lush proposals on how to move British funk forward, with "Give Me" and its dubwise flumes being the overall text. Beyond that song, the album open-mindedly absorbs all manner of other signals into the smooth funk surface – fluid bass fills, pocketed horns, concise beats that practically foresee house on the horizon, Jones' mature but undisciplined soul – and it's all set to songs that whether of infatuation ("Treacle", "Teacher") or contentment ("Minefield", "Music") all, as mentioned, take place in the here and now and seize what there is before it slips away. Appropriate enough, given I-Level's short lifespan.

"Minefield", second single and opening song, plants its flag after-hours in a Harlem club and its non-sequitur imagery is so jumbled that for all we know he might be proposing that we dance in an actual minefield. But the music, at once nimble and busy, is far from blurry or incendiary. Jones keeps his singing fluent and sophisticate while bass figures provide ladders for interlocking horns to leap frog each other while the beat goes on and on. The components in "Treacle" individually stop and start, providing understated animation in a steady song. The snapped-up "Stone Heart", an almost abstract assemblage of electro-disco, freestyle and even Japan over which an echoing Sam sings disproportionate shapes, calls to mind no-one as much as the Arthur Russell of Calling Out of Context (the vocal similarity is again there). It unexpectedly restarts mid-way through with a spare interlude of drum machine patterns over which a parade of sound effects and vocal snatches freely come and go as unresolved as they please. The cohesion that still emerges from the songs' quite unlikely structures is an accreditable point that isn't lost on me.

Later on, the great capaciousness of "No. 4" conceals the song's almost rock-like dynamics (clock the guitar figures that pass distantly in the background alongside – how's this for the album's sponge-like existence in the pop of 1983 – occasional Horn orchestral stabs). At least from the outside "Teacher" looks like it'll be the sort of clean-escape childhood fable that Linx, Junior and later Level 42 were no strangers to, and not a quaintly racy song uncomfortably wrapped in of-its-time teacher-student metaphors ("teacher can you teach me everything I need to know...") But although blatantly the album's least convincing track it's still a discursive enough retread of "Minefield", unusually timed harmonies n' all, and keeps the seat warm for the ensuing love song to music's comforting and healing powers. There's nothing specific in "Music", rather it, in perhaps classicist disco spirit, uses its lyric as a blank canvas to go about moving in one direction and suchlike. The closing "Face Again" is not so much a delve into lovers' rock, although it comes closer than other songs, but an elemental, dub-steady jazz-funk that reminds me of I-Level's adjacency to Sade (play back-to-back with "I Will Be Your Friend") and how this period of British pop ultimately has so many puzzle pieces that not many people get directed to try and fit.

But two songs I have kept back, from side one, stand as the album's most obvious and inclusive sideways glances to other worlds. "Heart Aglow" is a gorgeously skewed ambient excursion that is gently laced with surprising cuicas. It is largely weightless but for stray beats darting into the steam, before daring to come together in the second half only to simmer on the surface as momentary fireworks of horn and strings randomly ignite and evaporate; I am reminded of the unlikely blend of instrumentation afforded a song like Linx's "Intuition", but overall this sounds more like a kindred spirit to, say, "Sunshower" by Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, another aqueous, leftfield slide into the lazy summer. The ocean waves, remote island tenor and Style Council-bordering piano on "Woman" are hardly subtle, but combining these accents with almost obtrusive drum programming, which is playing at some odd angle, and you've got a would-be Balearic classic ahead of time. The etherealness of these songs are in their own way as woozy and unstraightforward as anything 4AD were putting out.

I-Level, despite fitting the tapestry as neatly as anything, despite being an engaging and inspiring dance record, and despite its numerous glances to both the wider present and the future, has sadly never been re-released (and seemingly Virgin UK's only since acknowledgement of its music was the American remix of "Give Me" appearing on their excellent Methods of Dance 1973-87 collection, while the seven-inches of both that and "Minefield" have resurfaced on Britfunk compilations from Old Gold and The Hit Label). After a further album that did even less business, 1985's Shake, the three members all went off in their own orbits (with Duncan Bridgeman notably to become a member of 1 Giant Leap in years to come; fill in the gaps yourself) and that was that. Still, if it has to sit pretty in some lost corner of the 1980s, it seems pretty assured of its own quality anyway. Why else the statuesque "i" on the sleeve (not even A.R. Kane did that), so huge it has life growing atop it? Quite a good metaphor, I think.

Crazy - Jump Leh We Jump (1991)

"Crazy, the lovable lunatic, the madman; call him anything, but never call him sane. Crazy is the most sought after performer today. No Soca Fete in the world is complete without 'The Lovable Lunatic'; he never fails to tantalise and mesmerise his audience driving them into hysterics."

– Sleeve notes of Jump Leh We Jump

One appealing thing about a lot of international music is there are artists who do stuff you could never get away with in Britain. Can you imagine a national mega star whose image, whose stage name, rests on the idea that one is a good-time nutter and a total one at that? Oh, I know we've had our Buster Bloodvessels and Captain Dreads, but to call yourself 'Crazy, The Lovable Lunatic' (that's his subtitle!) you'd be imprisoning yourself, or at least people's perception of you, through a thousand winks and all the arch riff-raff, always at perhaps several removes. Crazy is no such thing, and he genuinely is a lovable lunatic. I don't suspect he is one of genuine pop madness, not as we know it (Bill Drummond, say), but nor is he a novelty act. Rather, he was one of the most popular musicians in Trinidadian music, and his large audience throughout the decades was seeing him and his easy lightness of approach eye to eye.

He made his mark as a calypsonian in the mid-1970s and soon signed to Eddy Grant's Ice (as established in my Grant piece an innovative, perfectly realised label ripe for rediscovery), with whom he released some early soca ("Parang Soca") whilst competing annually in National Calypso Monarch events. The people of T&T took to his natural bonhomie and he regularly graduated to the finals. He was also one for the Carnival Road March, for whom he wrote anthems like 1982's semi-synthesised "Uncle Crazy" (whose bloopy steel drum break would feel like pop-avant territory in any British record), the same year he made his UK debut at the Pickett's Lock Centre. To distant ears like mine, 1984's brilliant "Soca Tarzan", also written for the March, corners towards Kid Creole territory and makes a mockery of Tight Fit and late Modern Romance with its balance of blatant urgency and instrumental workouts. The album under discussion came seven years later but the intervening years saw no great sea change; he had long been happily adhering to his tight but rewarding schedule throughout the years and Jump Leh We Jump is one product of this.

Now, I'm far from an expert or even proper connoisseur in this area of music, and at least historically know of no outlet closer, after all, than the Notting Hill Carnival, which is held 110 miles away, but I think many readers will agree its appeal is instant, and the days of me singing (or trying to) "Hot Hot Hot" at a family' friends karaoke when I was six or seven probably set up my taste for soca and calypso as much as the Caribbean Uncovered compilation that introduced the even younger me to other Caribbean styles outside of reggae and ska. But I digress... Jump was Crazy's tenth album and only contains four proper songs plus two versions and thus to some may appear rushed or compromised on the surface, especially given how quickly he went through albums, but its considered one of his best (and fastest) records not least to Bryon Lee's typically masterful production, who retains Crazy's essential tinny cheer while feeding the arrangements (an inherited mix of digital and live) extra subdued detail when required. As it turns out, four songs and two versions is all that is necessary.

As he would with any of his records, Crazy commences with a song (in this case one that is barely a song at all) to re-announce to the unwary new listener (along with that back cover blurb) who he is and what he does, and so uses the unfailing rhythmic template of "Leh We Get on Bad" as a sailcloth on which to adlib and toast, crack laughs, deliver the occasional verse when he's in the mood and engage in call-and-response with his oddly pocketed, backing soprano singers. All this cocksure geniality ensures the cartoon irony in the title and refrain (but then again, he is crazy/a lunatic/etc.) as the record is as undeniable as Super Blue's "Flag Party". He also takes the unusual decision to include a fully instrumental version (save for the response vox) just two tracks later, confident enough that even though he's barely on it, the album's magnetising appeal won't suffer for it at all (and it doesn't, not least because it allows a different way into the music and you can better notice how often new accents appear, like in one uncluttered instance some squidgy, almost Zapp burbles of 1980 synth. No detail goes unnoticed but they all cohere).

The more melodically-inclined, but no less heated, counterpoint is the terrific "Scoogie Woogie"; gleaning the nonsense popsteak of the title alone you may think this a song about getting it on, but then you hear it and it's actually the pet name for a woman who is admired for her charisma by everyone in the town from his friends to his parents, highlighting (through its admittedly odd focus) a communal attitude we don't so much have in 'our' pop (and thus 'we' don't have many songs like this; it feels an oddly twee and 60s from a UK/US pop perspective). The mirror version later on with toaster D.J. Flathead is one of playful Cutty Ranks-style romancing (and thus closer to the Jamaican ragga that in a few years would be embraced by the British public). In fact this version is pretty daring in its minimal design, frequently leaving Flathead to speedily toast formless shapes over only the tightly-knotted beat which, reliably charged enough on its own, only infrequently looks to hook up with other instruments.

It must be said that, typically for soca records, the music does not hustle the listener with its obvious fervor and trusts they will want to get involved on their own terms (like for instance coming to see the show or joining the carnival, where surely participation is inevitable). The invitation is nevertheless of course always there and this is particularly identifiable, "no matter what is your class, creed, or colour", on "Mas in Jamaica", practically designed (in usual Crazy style) as a component of the carnival, in this instance the one launched in Jamaica by Byron Lee himself the previous year (with, of course, the traditional masqueraders, hence 'mas'. You can practically hear the multihued fabric set pieces of the procession). It should be pointed out the album was recorded in Kingston's Dynamic Sounds, used of course by Tosh, Tubby, Cliff, Perry, Marley and plenty others, but which was also founded by Lee, while released specifically to UK, US, Canadian and Caribbean audiences by the studio's house label.

The record ends with "Fools" slowing the tempo ever so slightly and Crazy reminding you who he isn't as much as who he is. Crazy, yes. A fool, no. Fools, says Crazy, are racists, murderers, corrupt governments, the inventor of the nuclear bomb, Saddam Hussein, destroyers of nature, greedy money spinners and others. As always, it's all delivered in party style with his endearingly contrasting backers and I can get down with its flippancies. And even more so knowing that, though not mentioned here, fools also include homophobes; "Penelope", a song Crazy released the following year, advised listeners who "can't get a woman" to "take a man", and became a LGBT anthem in Trinidad and Tobago, a country whose law makers would rather such people didn't exist and, as author Wesley Crichlow pointed out, was a massive middle finger in the fact of the permeating homophobia in a lot of local music. Crazy? Brave, sure, but he's far too smart to be crazy or a lunatic. Still lovable, of course.

Wolfstone - Seven (1999)

It's not a popular opinion, not that there is a much of an established consensus around a small band's catalogue, but Seven is for me the greatest of all Wolfstone albums. Typically for one of their 90s records the production isn't as stern or oomphy as it could have been, but it is their most entrancing, which for me is important to consider given how I ever loved Wolfstone to begin with. Sure, they're a Celtic rock band from Inverness, with music from and for the people and those old stories and the infrastructure of what it is to be a folk band, but to me, as with numerous other bands from completely different places, they take me not only to my early childhood but especially to Stowford Farm, Farleigh Hungerford, a few miles up the road from me. Scottish, Irish and English folk music to me is the sound of the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival, which I attended annually, thanks to my parents and some of their friends being permanent fixtures in its fields since 1991. Just as it was inevitable that this blog would cover compilations, so it is with folk music, particularly folk which works as pop. There will be more to come, but there is a lot of folk rock and Celtic fusion that is enormously important to me, and I need to gradually tell that story here.

Not that the 'rock' in Wolfstone was always so pronounced, as initially they were set up around Duncan Chisholm's mastery of the local Scottish Highlands fiddle style, having studied under Donald Riddle, and the band only properly came into being when he met singer Stuart Eaglesham some time on. Their earliest recordings, issued locally around the turn of the 90s as Wolfstone and Wolfstone II (and later re-released without band consent) are all but disowned by the group and are inevitably the work of likeminded musical travellers who have not yet coalesced into that singular force, not least because of their reliance on a chintzy, inexpressive drum machine which they'd soon replace with Jon Henderson. Except I'm typically all for the cheap and cheery and even when they do stabilise into the 'classic' Wolfstone I receive much the same exudation of (com)passion out of their music, and you can clearly sense they'll reach the light at the end of the tunnel from day one much as Runrig did. And so, Unleashed (1991) and The Chase (1992), both for Iona Records, set their glacial stage with their mix of songs and instrumentals, standards and originals. By the time of 1994's Year of the Dog, their first on prestigious American Celtic label Green Linnet, they were a reliable part of the international folk circuit.

What Wolfstone can be seen to be doing was, in essence, a relocated continuation of the Big Music of Big Country, Simple Minds and others in central Scotland. By being removed geographically they also were socio-culturally; the punk that had informed those bands vanished, the ancient space ever vaster. Not only was the ignored world Stuart, Duncan, Ivan and the others lived in far smaller but so were their facilities, and it shows. The 'cheapness' in Wolfstone's bigness is key to their central magic; they really use their small-time production and parpy synths to their most logical zenith, not to transcend their land but to reanimate the pastoral music and stories they grew up on. Not 'bombastic', never; no matter how 1987 'stadium' their iconographic guitars, the music is still one of quietness, for small spaces dreaming big. This especially shows when, rather than max out, they emphasise the textural and intimate, as with the languid Ness interface of "The £10 Float" (or rather the first half of it, which sets up the valedictory second section), the geometric horizon of "Hard Heart" or the hollow, amorphous 'rock' of "Here Is Where the Heart Is" (mix it differently and you may have 'arena' or 'folk club' dub).

By remaining so small, Wolfstone of course faced no chance of being 'misunderstood'. 1996's The Half Tail, their best and most dynamic album up to this point, was also their final with lead vocalist Ivan Drever before he departed. What followed were protracted financial struggles that virtually killed the band off. Green Linnet still held them contractually accountable and this led to regrettable decisions like issuing Ivan and bassist Wayne Mackenzie's side-project This Strange Place as a Wolfstone record, despite being as un-Chisholm as, say, Connections & Disconnections was un-Clinton. The luridly packaged album (perhaps the most professional of any 'Wolfstone' project yet) was seen as a minimalist, reductive retreat into mellowness (although "The Wild Monkey Dance" would later be used as a live intro to "Clueless") and threw a band who were re-beginning anew, sans Ivan (with Stuart Eaglesham, who hitherto sang lead on some songs, sometimes as counterpoint to Ivan, taking over wholesale) completely off. Their reformation was again at Green Linnet's doing (the reason there are two versions of Lúnasa's Redwood is them fucking around with people's livelihoods too). But the new Wolfstone recorded the required Seven not just as contractual obligation but something to put their heart and soul into, a band who had to prove themselves, who didn't want the whole mess of 1996-98 to begin with and would actually love to get back on the road.

Compared to Ivan Drever, whose gravelly voice made him sound like the weight of his whole life was pent up inside everything he sang, Stuart is much more fey, more indie even. This was a necessary dynamic contrast on earlier albums, two different singers anchoring each other, bound by upbringing and experience. But now that Stuart is carrying lead vocals alone he ends up pushing the band the furthest away from rawk tropes that they'd ever get. That the whole group conjure up a more reflective, rootsier sound was perhaps them naturally following his lead, even when he isn't singing. On the first of the record's songs, album highlight "Brave Boys", they strip back to the point of it it barely counting as rock 'n' reel, instead prioritising Andy Simmers' flowing piano over any Celtic instruments (the fiddles are left to purr alongside bassy crashes in the semi-formless ambient intro, redolent perhaps of Jon Hassell). A modern McLean anti-war song, or that's at least how it seems, Stuart – weaving in cautions from Passchendaele and "the fields of France" – advises no shame felt by those brave boys who wish to "run away" ("just be your father's son"), and uses similar language even to Stump's "Our Fathers". The squiggly Hammond shapes in the final minutes, by turns melodic and freeform, are a curious choice of exit as they are treated with a serenity that stops them sounding like 60s/70s rock and instead a vague hum into more thoughtful times, perhaps.

Singing there, Stuart comes over like a Scottish Ian Broudie (a compliment!), yet a change of context on "Wild and the Free" makes him sound more like Glenn Tilbrook, which may be why the song proper resembles 1990s Squeeze (particularly their reposing from Some Fantastic Place and beyond) crossed with hints of the Waterboys' rustic mysticism, likewise on "Crowfeathers", which after its Inverness-vast prologue typically begins to transfigure the Big Music of Sparkle in the Rain into something more intimate for a smaller community, but anew. Sung from the perspective of adrift corbies a la "The Three Ravens", there is mindful imagery all over ("a feast of MacAdam's dead") but the song is one of contented free rein (whereas "Wild and the Free" is determinately reflective, just like "Tall Ships" was). The slightly soupy "Black Dog" is relatively slight and probably the closest thing to a weak link, but the Deacon Blue-evoking (a compliment!) rhythmic jolt is blatantly joyful, ergo hard to deny. What all of the songs convey is some sense of communal buckling up and helping each other through, and while I won't pretend to know anything much about Highland history this is still an unsurprising conclusion.

As always, the songs in all their urgency are balanced by the instrumentals, which reprioritise the order of personnel so that, with one exception, the pipes, fiddles and whistles accentuate and as jigs, reels and airs plot out destinations that songs alone do not. Although "Psycho Woman" (big nostalgia!) opens the album with a big Main Tent grin, a reliably stem-winding way of alerting us to their return (it is undeniably rollicking, even though that is not a word anyone actually uses in real life), the others are introspective and bewitching, loaded with implications and an overwhelming sense of place. "Maggie's" is to this album what "Clueless" was to The Half Tail, frantically searching for and then finding mirthful epiphany (providing, after "Psycho Woman", the album's second most obvious crowdpleaser), while "Jen's Tune" is a gorgeous little ruminative arrangement, one of those pieces who sound alone is instantly evocative of a time and place for me (of which more anon) from even before I ever really listened to it. It shares its dreamy, if slightly doleful tone with the twilight rave-up "Quinie Fae Rhynie", which trickles easily on pellucid keyboard drones, mist rolling down the Torridon mountains, and is rhythmically a near mirror image of "Black Dog", except this one requires its speed and heavy beat to shake its agitation off.

"Fingal's Cave", a traditional lament that is not to be mistaken for Mendelssohn's overture, is named for the arresting formation in the Inner Hebrides. In Wolfstone's hands there is a shuffling beat that in another context might be trip hop or something quite Soul II Soul but here is part of a morose cycle at sunset. A nautical Ian Crichton Smith poem is recited by a low, unco voice almost four minutes in but, buried in the mix and distorted by distended delay, it is near-impossible to grasp, a voice lost to the sea breeze (and a precedent for what Peatbog Faeries discovered vocals could be used to achieve in a number of years). The album ultimately ends on this curious, yet expansive note, like some slight trepidation about where Wolfstone may be headed that was to be ridded the moment they stood on stage again.

But the best instrumentals form the album's centre and are arrestingly crestfallen like few other music is to me. I know nothing of who keyboardist/pianist Andy Simmers was, and this was his only studio album with Wolfstone. Having joined the reformed group in 1998, he hanged himself during the tour that followed Seven in 2000, the band's second suicide after piper Roddy McCourt several years prior. But on Seven he plays a solo piano piece, "John Simmers", named for I assume a relative, but we don't know who he or what the story could be, and the enigmatic nature of Andy and this instrumental only heightens its prematurely mournful nature, two minutes of a maroon flame to stop all time. And it does to me what "The Eternal" or "Decades" off Closer do (maybe not to you, but this is music I know just as well and need as much). Think also, perhaps, of The Cure's "Homesick" (I came to that later).

Then it fades as softly as anything (so it is not isolated after all, and others are in the room) into Wolfstone's greatest piece, "J-Time". Hanging weightlessly over a synthesised ambient drone with wordless coos for a minute, the deep breath before it is time to proceed, the band come in steady and collected, a forlorn Celtic melody central to its slightly swinging fabric and Andy's jazzy piano solo downcast but subtly stunning. It adds some explanation, of sorts, to "John Simmers" in that it is not resigned but, in my ears, yearning for a state (a feeling, or environment) it knows can still exist. If this sounds flowery bare in mind that for me that's precisely what it is, as it brings back some of the happiest of all memories; as a very young boy, listening to CDs with my dad in the conservatory, making compilations of Village Pump Festival music and enjoying the wonder of it and its music with, as with all music I loved back then, nascent, sculpting wide-eyes. So yes, melancholia galore, but the melancholy here is particularly so because of what it symbolises, and it is blissful. My dad still considers its a "great chill tune", and it's music for me that, as with much of Seven, allows me to step beside myself and into my fables times, and in doing this, things can be put back into perspective upon my re-entry into earth. This is the genuine power of nostalgia for someone like myself (but maybe the argument there is one I can have another day).

But of course, in magnifying these contemplative moments some disservices are being done. Wolfstone's standing as a band for people to get happily drunk and dance to/with at folk festivals is, well, is, and even though personal tragedy imposed natural soul searching, the group found that touring Seven was just what they needed to get back on track, not least exemplified on the of course lively Not Enough Shouting live record. And even if later albums, all leaner sounding, saw ye olde rock boot in to extents I think would, again, turn away some unsuspecting readers (not that it stops me liking Almost an Island in the slightest, maybe their third best album, although Terra Firma, made with singer Ross Hamilton, oddly recalls Incubus at times), Seven is despite everything the one. Wolfstone pensiveness done particularly winsomely. That album count title is marking dues to history, but the music itself is as deliberately required: a new beginning.

Various - Club Mix 97 Volume 3 (1997)

I reckon you could walk into any charity shop across the country and leave with a solid dance compilation in your hands, typically one from the 1990s or 2000s. I don't think many of the people I know who make noise about their charity shop purchases (hi there) are really bothered about them, whereas beyond purchasing many collections of this type first-hand upon release, I've been at them for most of my life. It was inevitable since the moment I conceived this blog that at some point I was going to start doing pieces on compilations; it's not like all the music I love is album-friendly.

By 'dance compilation' – and allow me to be very 1990s-specific, given the subject of this piece – I of course don't mean Warp Classics or Blueprint (The Definitive Moving Shadow Album) but rather, say, anything from strands such as In the Mix, Now Dance, Club Mix, The Best Club Anthems...Ever!, Dance Level Zone [x], On a Dance Tip, Kiss in Ibiza and the like. The mainstream (in terms of marketing if not always content) compilations of normally up-to-the-minute surveys of what's about in British clubland, as issued by major labels (Virgin/EMI, PolyGram TV, Telstar TV, BMG, Universal TV, WEA). Not that all of these compilations strictly mine the same territory, but typically what you'll get is an eclectic compilation centred on (typically) house and its siblings with numerous hits, a lot of deep cuts, with labels like Positiva, Manifesto, Xtravaganza and FFRR dealing out the cross-licensing. In other words, what you'd expect from genre compilations modelled loosely after the Now template.

As such, a lot of the compilations bear music that has not been remembered, tracks which were current then, only to be apparently forgotten forever, and much of this music has never incited critical discussion. It mostly wasn't 'hardcore continuum' stuff, or album dance, so if you're invested in those worlds it isn't what you're "supposed" to be interested in. The "cool" stuff is happening elsewhere, apparently. Tellingly, many of those that reached the top 40 only received daytime national radio play in chart countdowns (every 90s chart turns up its forgotten dance hits, whether of the commercial or 'tasteful' variety) and many sit in the one-pound bins. And yet turn to Discogs, look at practically any house, trance and suchlike single from the 90s and reel in the high ratings counts and nostalgic clubbers leaving reviews and piecing together history when no one else will.

Generally, there are three levels to 90s dance compilations, as in the sort that were advertised on TV and could be bought at Woolies and entered the compilations chart. Ones with 'dance' in the name were the vastest through their incorporation of commercial dance music (Eurodance, straight up dance-pop, etc.), whereas those saying 'club' focused on the house, garage, trance and stuff that was more 'credible', that the superclubs were playing. Then finally there were the superclub compilations themselves (MoS, Cream) or tastemaker radio (Kiss), perhaps the "final word" on what "mattered" to the self-conscious in this infrastructure. Broadly speaking, of course. Lament if you want the absence of a Ghettotech Hits, The Best of Neurofunk '97 or IDM Mix III lining the Tesco CD shelves, especially as all music is conversation with each other, but for many people experiencing dance music in Britain this was how it would be. So why ignore these releases, especially when there's so many of them?

Club Mix 97 Volume 3, mixed by siblings St. Peter & Heaven, belonged to PolyGram's Club Mix series, initiated a year earlier. The origins of the club-oriented DJ mix album go back to the 1970s at the latest (A Night at Studio 54, Casino Classics: Chapter One) but in terms of the modern manifestation in Britain, Ministry of Sound were first on the money in 1993. By 1995 and the launch of The Annual it was obvious it was a good business and so Virgin/EMI (with In the Mix), PolyGram and everyone else gradually followed suit. And the rest, they say, is... Why profile this edition in particular? I've listened to it incessantly for over a year, firstly as what might appear to be escapism when the first lockdown began as part of my fixation with 'forgotten' 90s chart dance (except music is always a distraction from the world beyond my home). It's now among my favourites, balancing classics and the unjustly overlooked, and hopefully I'm about to make a good case explaining why...

The opener

It's standard practice for compilations of this type to open with a consensus hit and "Free" was staring at them in the face. Aged 29, it was Ultra Naté herself freed from many unsuccessful attempts at that one bona fide crossover. Once signed to Warner Bros, she made an admirably diverse set of records with the Basement Boys, Nellee Hooper, D-Influence and even System 7, but even when fellow singers Robin S and Ce Ce Peniston were able to break even the US top ten it would not be until "Free" that Naté had her equivalent garage-handbag anthem, one that has endured throughout the decades no matter how many remixes or new contexts get thrown at it. A reliably stirring part of any of '90s classics' package.

And I write 'anthem' because, like "Finally" (they make great companion pieces), that is so obviously what it is. The song and particularly its chorus came about through Naté wanting to divert from label pressure, and as Lem Springsteen himself has put it, she and him genuinely did feel stuck, so the fight is audibly genuine. The incendiary chorus is the natural release that the unassertive verses conceal. She's there to go about stirring on ("If you gave more than you took, life could be so good"), before "now's the time, 'cus you're FREE to do what you want to do" and the bronze minor keys join her in lighting the way out, like "I'm So Excited" two decades on and still excited. How endearing it is too that 1997's most instantly recognisable guitar intro isn't that of a rock song (although rock was the influence and Woody Pak keeps spinning those Vini Reilly webs throughout – compare with the latter's Balearic effort Obey the Time). Unlike Deniece Williams with own "Free", Ultra Naté was unfortunate to never reach number one, despite spending eight straight weeks at numbers four-eight, the sort of chart stiffness that "Hey Ya" and "Angels" later had to deal with. But like those songs it got out of it well enough by effectively becoming Public Pop in the meantime.

The future

I needn't underline what nascent UK garage, 1997's most promising new discursion, ended up doing for British music. It's importance is right there. Turn on the radio and you can hear music made possible because of a lineage which the likes of, say, Dreem Teem, 187 Lockdown or Double 99 were, on their turn, a huge part of. Or just listen to the relevant cuts here and see this future as we know it today suddenly snap far more into view than on any equivalent 1996 mix CD. As a music born from both jungle and house, how exciting and natural it must have been for a sound to thrive both on the pirates and in house clubs and still spill over into the charts undigested, something jungle alone – more rooted to rave's version of subcultural capital than house's (where's the jungle equivalent to this mix?) – often struggled to.

Yet hints of this particular future on this compilation begin with a remix from 1995. I remember being surprised way back when to discover that was Rosie Gaines duetting with Prince on "Diamonds and Pearls", but the original "Closer Than Close" is much more in line with the New Power Generation to whom she belonged, as essentially a tasteful neo-soul slow jam if not much more. Then Mentor had the idea to stick her a cappella over sped-up garage house beats and... it's not necessary to dwell on the US-UK garage split that this remix accelerated; it's well documented elsewhere how a visiting Tony Humphries was taken back by how this was already one of 'our' records, London's own advancement on their longstanding MK/Todd Edwards/etc NY fix. But one thing led to another and speed garage was recognisably the London thing, and what better single to largely kick it properly into life?

I actually heard "Closer Than Close" during a rather miserable car ride a few months back, and berate Craig Charles's soul and funk show for few surprises or risks if you will, but hearing that, Frank Wilson's "Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" and Central Line's "Walking Into Sunshine" (three favourites from different generations there) was a mood lifter even in the bleak dead of night on country roads. Here on the compilation she continues Ultra Naté's commitment to a better tomorrow the moment that elastic bounce, at once unshowy and blatantly exciting, tries to trip the beats of the prior song into double speed. Gaines still sounds like she's playing at 2x speed on Media Player (and invents the sound of AutoTune abuse, without any actual such manipulation in use, at the same time).

And yet Armand van Helden's immortal Dark Garage Mix of "Spin Spin Sugar" is opposingly paced; fatigued and draggy, too disoriented, and disorienting, to process the speed of time around it. This was the effects of speed garage's entropic time-stretched vocals, which here sprawl disproportionately high as there is no room anywhere near the bottom end with all that BASS enveloping everything around it. Such mutant low end – the main attraction (the hook!), so severe and inspiriting – was more the reserve of the more dread-happy ends of jungle (think Ed Rush, Nico etc.), the hitherto most unrelenting crossover dance to bear such radio-unfriendly sub-bass arguably being as far back as "LFO" (think it's weightless interludes). Yet here is the alien funk sound of the future breaking through in the middle of the market long before 2-step, grime and beyond helped batter it into familiarity.

This is not to take anything away from Sneaker Pimps' original, a surprisingly effective cut of noxious post-trip hop that is closer to the winded hellscapes of techstep than is given credit. But in Armand's hands it is the monochrome London sound of 1997 waiting patiently inline to evolve into all the colour of what is to come. "I'm everyone. I feel used. I'm everyone. I need you." We are in even more claustrophobic nether regions than "Professional Widow", erotica and creepiness as one singular force. Marcello Carlin highlighted the "floating clouds of handless A.R. Kane" guitars on the latter track and here, in a new discoloured shade of psychedelia, they resurface unmoored up there with Kelli Ali in the mix, distant but huge shivers of silicon danger, kept afloat by the murkiness below. Yet everyone is dancing. How could they not.

And "Fly Life", in its central Brix Mix, is so startling, so fuckingly 21st century, it's the best thing not just here but in virtually any context (bar maybe its own creators' The Singles and that's only because of "Lucky Star", possibly the most extreme development on what started right here). Before this, Basement Jaxx were knowingly retrograde, part of the fetishising nu-house bunch too young to catch wave of NY garage's most iconographic days and so, in almost acid jazz-minded sensibility, went about chasing it. This certainly, because by design, did not result in music that was anything less than solid (although Simon Ratcliffe's best record in this period was Helicopter's more animated "On Ya Way"), but nor did it in any way even hint at their most batshit ambitions, or much engagement with what was immediately around them. Their Nuyorican-by-way-of-Brixton approach got a shot to the arm with 1996's "Samba Magic" with its fiesta speed and Tony Moran-goes-salsa chords. There was something in there, if only they continue to work at it.

But *this* brazen raggamuffin rave-up with bladed disco stabs and white noise and an unexhausted sack of ideas intermingling, a complete hyper-reconstruction of dance music, came just *one* single later. Virtually all that's fertile about UK club stuff in the 90s – house, garage, rave, jungle, dancehall – is funnelled through one life-affirming behemoth (the best 12" of its year with "Ripgroove") and you cannot even pause to take in all the astonishing newness, not even in its daredevil beatless breakdown, all ambient waters and echoed vox stutters, which issues no warning as to when the next "JUMP!" smites and the beat and all the deliration it brings with it will strike again. So you're capable of this, are you? Maximalism as freedom, everyone under one roof. And it had been a good few years since ragga emceeing had sounded like something was bubbling, ready to spill into the rest of pop (I am thinking not just of jungle but the '93 summer of ragga; hits like Louchie Lou & Michie One's "Shout (It Out)" which unlike Bowie and 'the' Art of Noise made "Peter Gunn" a possible sound of the future by making it act as a drone).

And so Basement Jaxx, about to stock up on their P-funk and Prince, went and did an album, Remedy, and house was... well I won't quote Armand van Helden's profane assessment of what they did to snap house music back into the centre of things, but suffice to say they're hyperactive minds that won't rest until they've tried making everything they love in music, in sound, get along like a house on fire. Proper integration, rather than dense co-existence, undigested eclecticism. Everything that makes Jaxx perhaps my favourite thing about pop music in the late 1990s through to the mid-00s begins with "Fly Life".

Big breax

"Naked & Ashamed" is high up the track list and also appears on Dance Level Zone 9. Weird, considering it was a non-charting 12" and these compilations don't usually plug random JBO sides. And yet here's the rousing big beat of Dylan Rhymes with all the saturated acid burbles you relish from Better Living Through Chemistry, keeping the label engaged with its Planet Dust past. No, nothing particularly revelatory on its own but it's at least more Propellerheads than Crystal Method and swarms valiantly at the end of JBO: A Perspective 1988-1998 (right before "Moaner" comes in to decimate everything).

Slacker's "Scared (The Lonely Traveller)" does the house breaks thing too and was something for XL to entertain themselves with as they prepared for The Fat of the Land. Its upturned 1990 ambient breakdown of indeterminate distractions and unsettling, adjust-your-senses sample of a fearful young woman ("I don't like what's going in the world, I'm scared more than drugs") was atypical territory for the label (if one ignores past triumphs like "Weather Experience") if not quite "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" flippant.

Pizzicatata

After its 'dream' variant, the emergent trance sound of mainland Europe in 1996/97 was the use of pizzicato string refrains, a flexible template that could result in records that were spirited, sullen or anywhere between. Many credit Faithless' "Salva Mea" as the instigator, before they then writ it larger on "Insomnia" (yes, that), leading to all sorts of pundits trying it for themselves from Sash! to Disco Citizens, often with much crossover success, and compare with the continent's immediate soundalikes of "What Time Is Love?" almost a decade earlier to realise how this is club culture in good health (the will to expand on a great new sound). Usually known as pizzicato prog (because it's often more accurately a strain of progressive house than trance, and no, now is not the time to defend that poorly-named music as a whole from dissenters' easy shots) it was identifiably enough a thing to form the template of a host of compilations (particularly in Germany), but like most developments in this world it has yet to be usefully written about. When will we get an Energy Flash for all the 90s dance that wasn't so critically probed?

Red 5's "I Love You...Stop!", released by Multiply and among the most forgotten number 11 hits of the whole decade, marks one of a few brushes with the style here. It's very much a close cousin of DJ Quicksilver's "Bellissima" in its strings exuding a very glacial, almost stately texture (for an unlikely comparison my mind is going to Simple Minds' peak 1981-84 Big Music), essentially post-minimalism as dance music (am I losing you yet?) to the point where everything else on the record seems a necessary afterthought (even the title – the only thing sung in the song, albeit without the ellipsis so it bleeds into one "Iloveyerstah!" leitmotif – puts 'feeling' over any inherent meaning). Follow-up single "Lift Me Up", remember that one? No?

When building my library of Now albums as a boy, and particularly from when I discovered Pink Planet Games Exchange in 2005, it was fascinating to buy older editions and marvel at all those enigmatic dance artists, usually at the back of the second disc where Ashley Abram typically hoovered up odds and ends having got past the big and almost-as-big hitters. Browsing the booklet of Now 37 ahead of playing the music I wondered who these Orbital stick figures next to the fancy car were (CD2 track 16) and particularly who Brainbug, next on the disc, could be. His monochrome visage was that of a, well, brain bug, or some sort of Mars Attacks!ish alien clad menacingly in sci-fi trousers besides a plinth of atomic energy, ominously clawing towards some unseen lifeform. The track was called "Nightmare". What was I in for?

When trance gets a bit stupid, not only aware of its grandeur but celebratory of it, it gets really good. In its charting Sinister Strings Mix (although other remixes, like the fantastic Synergetic, don't distract from its core appeal too much), "Nightmare", as playful as pizzicato gets, is case in point. It's camp gothic horror, a suspenseful B-movie terror symphony (with the sharp string note familiar to Positiva trance) throwing itself over a rubbery bass part that sounds like your scared heartbeat as you hide from the unseen threat. The video plays up to it, all grainy black & white 50s budget horror trailers with plastic brains and what not.

'Ard 'ouse and other nuttiness

Coming into 1997 hard house and associated sounds (nu-NRG etc.) were in very fine shape, the unifying scenes now very vast and long-since freed from being strictly bound to the roots of hardbag (Tony De Vit even had his own Kiss show, and see his Kiss Mix 97 disc for parallels). The Difference released on the Netherlands' Blue Limited and their "Funny Walker", here in its most popular Tweeky & Funk-ky Remix, is mad stupid – a knowingly obnoxious acid whir going on an adventure in sound as it repeats with Fatboy-esque mischief in all different directions. Think of how "Poing" or Winx's "Don't Laugh" play unrelentingly with their gimmicky noises and you'll have some idea, but think also of "Dooms' Night", the way its dissonant propellers speed up and disappear into a beatless, momentum-keeping mid-section then back out again, and hear how the same thing more or less happens here three years earlier.

Manifesto were licensed a particular favourite of mine. "Go with the Flow" is something of a minor classic for Loop Da Loop, aka Nicolas Dresti, with its delightful '97-as-fuck acid techno synths and a pitch-altered B-boy (MC Duke's "I'm Riffin", as also used on Criminal Minds' "Baptised by Dub") hollering his thing just like with the better-remembered Porn Kings' "Up to No Good" or Klubbheads' "Klubbhopping" (their name always makes me imagine them with giant inflatable clubs on their heads, or even for heads), or even "Tha Wildstyle", Dresti's earlier classic as DJ Supreme. The only proper hit he achieved as LDL, 1999's "Hazel" (remember that one? No?), marvelously wove his indelicacies into Mint Royale-type party big beat.

Lorraine Cato's "Love On & On" is likably remixed here (in an "Element of Surprise Dub") by E-Motion of naughty north/sexy south semi-fame but is more conventional than the hybrid of rave nostalgia and hardbag that they were coalescing just a year earlier. Baby Doc's remix of NRG's "Never Lost His Hardcore" is a lot more successful and, as the name suggests, remembers 1992 very fondly and sees no reason why those menacing rave hoovers (think Nebula II) should be disinfected and discarded when they still have the power to turn your blood to sludge. Carl Younge and Slipmatt get a turn with "Can You Feel the Heat", once again one for a swarm of extreme Pump Panel noise.

More house and more still

Funky house, which was slowly becoming house's dominant style in the charts and the clubs, pervades the first disc, and while typically demonstrating his well-honed garage smarts, Todd Terry's "Something's Goin' On" continues the disco flirtations that were unavoidable on "Keep on Jumpin'", the humble result being as '99 Soulsearcher as it is Full Intention. The no-frills "Heaven on Earth" (Spellbound via Dilion & Dickins) is speedy deep funk with a punchbag beat (allow for some oceanic ambience), "pure" dance music which proceeds very easily into Nush's remix of Sara Parker's "My Love Is Deep", almost the same track but with a song attached. "Satisfied (Take Me Higher)" by H2O then undoes the tunefulness and we are back in tracky, emphasise-the-bass matter, something that couldn't be emphasised more than it is on the 'Rocksteady Dub' of Problem Kidz' "Misbehavin'", a filter-house groove that priorities its hissing bass so ahead of anything else it's practically all there is to take from it, likewise the Higher State mix of Koolword Productions' "Invader" (by this point the 'funk' has inevitably disappeared).

More pop-leaning, if still rather stripped back, are cuts like Mr Spring's "Break It" and the Cold Crystal Mix of ORN's "Snow", a quite simple track from the late Deconstruction staple. The melody isn't very elaborate, and the builds are where you'd expect them, yet all this understatedness evenly combines for a fetching seven minutes of house, one of my favourite moments on the whole compilation (although only three minutes are used), so it evidently knows what it's doing. Tin Tin Out, one of those production duos who could completely change their sound at a second's notice if necessary (I do hopefully plan to write about them separately at some point, not least because they were to release of the year's best singles), make an appearance remixing some intensity into the otherwise not-terribly-interesting "Legends" from the second Sacred Spirit album (which operated under the idea of being a 'cultureclash' but to its credit is more listenable than your Enigmas and what not).

My friend always considered Hondy's near-titular "Hondy (No Access)" among his favourite songs, and I agree that it's an exquisite lost gem of 90s Euro-drama, unfortunately a modest flop (reaching number 26) when tried out as a single in spring 1997 (having been first issued as "No Axess" in 1995). The singer (who is she?) and her falsetto bellows ("HonnnDYYYYY") are as striking as they would be on any record, while the breathy verses, where she (sounding not unlike the Kylie Minogue of 1997 – if it wasn't for that chorus yodel this would fit perfectly onto Impossible Princess) visits different places in search of something, only to get no access, are meaningless but importantly they don't sound meaningless. Hondy, aka Souled Out, were later to combine with fellow Italian act Kamasutra to become Planet Funk, whose 2001 hit "Chase the Sun" is one of the greatest records of the last 20 years.

Disc two is a thoroughly trance-ridden affair (save for the hard house and adjacent music already covered) but there's still the odd exception. Every now and then, Tall Paul (usually under a pseudonym like Camisra or Escrima) would break the Top 40 with a track that owed very little to pop, but his "Rock Da House" here is comparatively melodic (justabouts) and its overdriven surface foreshadows mid-00s electro house (which is to say it and the typically minimal vocal combine for an almost 80s simplicity. Or would if it weren't for the rave cheer and, very Alex Party, those melt-in-the-mouth CZ-101 organs).

Trance nation

As suggested, the second disc homes mostly trance, by 1997 the red blood cells of European clubland. Ariel's "Deep (I'm Falling Deeper)", as remixed by Red Jerry, has shades of "Go" and a slightly melancholic underswell that subsists into Disco Citizens' essaying of Lucy Drayton's "To Be Loved", which balances its speed with ethereal, lost-in-reverb-space vocals and ambient hums (very much part of trance's dream pop sector, if not actually dream trance). B.B.E.'s "Flash" was a departure from the vague, echoing ricochets of "Seven Days and One Week" and instead a melodic glance forward to the world of System F, while Ascension's "Someone" is standard issue Perfecto, with some Grace piano (they appear themselves with "Hand In Hand") and a yearning, cooing Joanna Law, also the voice of Way Out West's "The Gift" (and who tried out a solo career at the start of the decade in the post-Soul II Soul vein), but is not among the label's greatest releases. Whereas I've always been weirdly fond of "Shine" by the Space Brothers, which isn't all that different (I'll put this down to its sonar melody).

"Café del Mar" is bloody "Café del Mar". To those into trance you either find it overplayed or you're like many who have ever bought a Ministry of Sound compilation, or listened to Essential Mix, or been to a trance night, and consider it holy writ. Or you're me, someone who does really like it, just not to those venerated levels. Obviously it's the Three 'N One remix here, that which has had many lives (including only a year later upon re-release, hence why it's on both '97 and '98 dance anthologies), and the edit's greatest move is how there is little ambient build before suddenly it is just there, that plucked arpeggio (yet more pizzicato) playing to infinity. I've never even been to a nightclub (no, honestly! I'll probably explain it all someday) but even a track that's so obviously made to be experienced with many other lifelivers around you sounds immersive enough alone in my ears (trance of this sort, big tasteless crashes et al, does gesture on a huge scale, like Jim Steinman gone to Ibiza). The music video, which is saturated-to-heck and has white flashes to change shots, is the most 90s video ever made.

The previous Club Mix opened with David Morales' remix of U2's "Discotheque" but none of the remaining Pop remixes (of which there were many) featured on any of the year's mainstream dance compilations (nor indeed anything from Pop itself. Wot, no "Mofo"?) But just as with prior U2 covers from Clivillés and Cole and Mica Paris, never mind mid-90s not-quite-samples-Island-won't-have-that classics "Only You" and "Landslide", it was often other artists bringing "dance U2" to the charts rather than the group itself. "With or Without You" appears courtesy of Mary Kiani, formerly of The Time Frequency (who famously sold loads of records in Scotland but not south of the border, leading to some middling chart positions). Many won't recall her earlier hits (and this one stalled at number 46) but the tech-trance remix here virtually does away with the song altogether, even its chord progression, and frankly who cares when we have those lovely rolls of piano-house taking us back to the days of Balearic beat (at this point we are still seven years off LMC "Take Me to the Clouds Above", for those asking at the back).

Best of all is Vincent de Moor's "Flowtation". I mean it better deliver the goods if its to crib its name from the Grid's "Floatation", which in its Subsonic Grid Mix is my favourite dance track of all time. But it was good enough for XL (!) to release it in a rare moment of trance on its territory, so you figure they'd only want to touch the most credible imports within that enormous field. With its seamless ebbs and flows and an easily-created feeling of wonder that so much trance tries so hard to conjure it is rightly a classic among 'the community' and deserved to crossover here, although it never actually did. Note, I'm talking about the original mix (the version featured), because the radio mix has singing by one Luciana who tries her hardest to turn it into a 2002 Ian Van Dahl single for no good reason at all.

The compilation ends with a dense recasting of CJ Bolland's "The Prophet", one of those strange nightclub-as-church sermon tracks that comes along every now and then (cf. Fatboy Slim's "Drop the Hate", Eddie Amador's "Rise") – note also the "come with me" refrain and think of Special D. What goes around comes around – and finally the noisy Andy Ling mix of Sunscreem's "Catchy", a bunch of squiggly acid that, to link back with the start of the disc, keeps some unmissable melancholia in its blank spaces.

A word on the rival

The roughly equivalent rival release, albeit issued a month later, was In the Mix 97 3. There are only several records in common ("Closer Than Close", "Fly Life" and a different mix of "Nightmare") and helps go some way towards completing the story. "Ecuador" is as bonkers as ever, "the Age of Love" a time-starting 12", "Block Rockin' Beats" enormously influential in my life and Airscape's sublime "Pacific Melody" where I may have liked to have ended this piece. When there is so much happening in single, or specifically 12"-oriented, music at any one time, there's many signals to receive and examine. As someone far removed in time (born just months later), I love how, thanks to the abundance of compilations like these, a project like Join the Dots, formatted the way it is, can go back in time and stick it's misshapen antenna out.