This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow & POLL

I know what I'm voting for but it's really not easy.

"Meniscus" is my ringtone.

It feels wrong to just pick the best song ("Strength of Strings" maybe?). I'll have to relisten with arrangement and performance in mind.

Then again, the best song on It'll End in Tears is also the best track: "Song to the Siren."

good ringtone! I don't know if SoS is the best song but maybe you are right. I agree with your evaluation of It'll End In Tears and is probably why I decided it was not worth polling. SttS would get not just the most votes but the bulk of the total votes. I personally cannot listen to it any more fwiw.

why on earth start a poll at 3am? I think you know why....

Haven’t put this on in 25 years but Come Here My Love was easily the one I listened to most.

I generally listen to it a few times a year but have been listening to it non-stop during the pandemic.

I love the original of "I Want to Live", can't remember what the version on here is like.

... Rutkowski Sisters, so it's probably good.

I heard the original for the first time today. Really good. I take it the album is a must?

Never heard it! I doubt it's as good as that song or else it'd be famous.

This isn't going very well, probably my fault for starting a poll at 3am and giving it a week to run!

I'm voting for I Must Have Been Blind, which I prefer to SttSiren as a song and as a TMC track. It's also, very sadly, the only Richenel contribution to the TMC project.

Fwiw, Richenel died of lung cancer just a fortnight ago. RIP.

Some more from him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Avjl-FDg9k

How sad, what a fascinating guy. (fwiw he also sang Firebrothers on the same side of the album).
Voted Strength of Strings because it leaped most vividly from memory when I read the tracklist. Vivid memories of a specific place and time, haven't listened to it much since.

Oh, I didn't know about Firebrothers, thanks.

i never really listened to this album after i bought it. but you are right this is perfect music when you are in isolation. the one tmc i always come back to is the first i got, blood. phantastic sunday early evening hangover music.

it's "ivy and neet". it sounds like the music you would listen to floating in space light years away from the next living being.

RIP Richenel, what a shame.

Indeed, L'Esclave Endormi is one of the best things the label put out although the original 12" mix, which was initially released on the Belgian label Megadisc is far superior to the Ivo/Fryer mix which they put on the A Side of the 12" with the orig. on side B. I only found out recently that it's actually a cover.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

haven't heard this in forever, so guessing "My Father."

side 4 of this to me is inexplicably not up to scratch compared to the first 3 sides

I get that, for sure. I love Thais (II)

I think we can assume that You and Your Sister would win a Blood poll?

I can't remember what the versions of "My Father", "Morning Glory" and "The Jeweller" are like on here, but I love the originals. Voted "I Want to Live" over "Strength of Strings", but only just.

Blood poll I dunno, I'd go for 'Til I Gain Control Again

I can't remember what the versions of "My Father", "Morning Glory" and "The Jeweller" are like on here, but I love the originals. Voted "I Want to Live" over "Strength of Strings", but only just.

I'd vote for I Want to Live of those but yes, only just. All of those are quite extraordinary on this record.

Blood poll I dunno, I'd go for 'Til I Gain Control Again

wow, yes.

I had heard just a bit of TMC and knew that I liked them enough to buy the first box set when it came out. It included a fourth disc of the originals that were covered on the albums. I wound up listening to that much more than the other discs. It’s one of my favorite various artists discs that I have.

Yeah that comp is incredible and like you I probably listened to that disc more than any of the TMC records

It’s between the Dominic Appleton voiced tracks for me. Really love the Breathless albums from that period and he has the quintessential 4AD voice for me, even though he was never on the label.

I heard the original for the first time today. Really good. I take it the album is a must?

The album being "Portland" by Gary Ogan & Bill Lamb. Just listened to it. I'm not really into that West Coast singer songwriter thing so I found it a bit cloying tbh, more Bread than Tim Buckley tbh (though I actually like Bread!) Gets better as it goes on.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Not a bad turn out considering my poor methodology.

Where is Hideous Lump's vote for Meniscus? Perhaps he or she voted for something else.

It's good that Inch Blue got two votes!

I'm always surprised by I Want To Live's "I'm rather selfish/and I mean to be unkind" - I think I spent a long time thinking it was "I'm rather selfish/I don't mean to be unkind" which is obviously much less interesting. It's a surprising thing to say in a song.

"Strength of Strings" is an incredible song but I'm not wild about their cover

Where is Hideous Lump's vote for Meniscus? Perhaps he or she voted for something else.

Or he's a dick and didn't get around to voting.

Probably would have been "Strength of Strings" after all.

"‘Strength of Strings’ is an incredible song but I'm not wild about their cover"

I feel that way about a lot of this album (and Blood). Rather a disappointment after It'll End in Tears where the covers are equal to or even better than their originals.

for the love of god please let us refrain from revisiting The Hope Blister

I've never heard those records. The name itself gives me the heebeejeebees.

"The Horizon Bleeds and Sucks Its Thumb" - SAME

The Hope Blister wasn't bad, but no it was no This Mortal Coil.

For me it was the moment I realised I was done with 4AD-as-an-aesthetic, which I'd been into for 10 years or so. Apparently Ivo as well!

Hope Blister suffered somewhat from not really being an ensemble in the way TMC was, it was a 4AD house band playing an album of covers. But it was treated as the second coming of TMC. But as you say, at that point Ivo seems to have been over it!

Glad to hear the Hope Blister disappointment wasn't just me. I kept banging my head against that wall. "Why don't I like this?"

In the late 1990s, Ivo's struggle with depression still wasn't publicly known, but on 4AD fora people seemed to detect that things were not well with him purely from The Hope Blister album.

Disappointed I missed this and agree that it makes for very good quarantine listening. I’ve always had mixed feelings about this album as despite continuing to be extraordinarily well-chosen, the covers here vary pretty widely in quality and a few (okay, mostly Drugs) are outright stinkers. A couple that should be great (Strength of Strings, I’m lookin’ at you) are only so-so and Appleton’s histrionics periodically threaten to drag the whole thing down. And most of the instrumentals are sort of superfluous though I do like Meniscus as well.

That said, the good stuff here is exceptional. Come Here My Love sounds absolutely nothing like the Veedon Fleece track and is incredible and unnerving. Tarantula surpasses the Colourbox original, and Appleton’s kind of stilted verse notwithstanding can’t undermine how beautiful the Rutkowski sisters sound on the pre-chorus and chorus.

But it’s their rendition of I Want To Live, which completely kills me and remains utterly spellbinding a quarter century or so after I first heard it. Again, it’s another track that sounds almost completely disconnected from the original yet the sisters just totally own the thing. What a performance.

very otm

I love "strength Of Strings" but don't know the original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfx4vefHdKs

Okay, that's way more wonderful than I expected, thankyou!

I haven't heard Gene Clark and still never got any Byrds albums.

I did a mix inspired by Filigree & Shadow for a local radio station but it's available to listen back to here: https://soundcloud.com/araho/colins-very-4ad-mix

Enjoying the mix jed, thank you.

cheers!