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.