mclusky - To Hell With Good Intentions

It had escaped my attention that the might mclusky, Welsh lords of smartassery and noise rock, had reunited and released a new record in 2025. That is, until the blogging Voltron known as Jokonky mentioned it in their Comeback Special 2025 post a few weeks back. So I dutifully ran out to my local purveyor of new CD's and vinyl, picked up the specially-order K-pop Christmas gift for the missus, and plunked down an additional $14.99 plus tax for the pleasure of mclusky's fourth full-length, "The World Is Still Here And So Are We". If I'd been more patient, I could have waited for Bandcamp Friday and made sure the band/label got all the dollars. But it's a mitzvah to kick your local retailer some bread, especially when they track down a limited edition version of a CD you've already bought your wife twice. You gotta get her that mini figure.

Ahem.

"The World..." is still growing on me, but it was inspiration to then dump my entire mclusky archive onto my phone and get my dick pounded into mush by noise rock over the next week plus. I claim no mega fandom, only a great respect for a band I'm pretty salty I never got to see live. And why not share an out-of-print EP for my friends' listening pleasure? Surely, they also enjoy the occasional genital destruction via rock tuneage. So here's the 4-song "To Hell With Good Intentions", the title track of which appeared on the all-timer "mclusky Does Dallas". The other three songs also appear on the 3-disc limited version of "mcluskyism". I invite you, should you have a spare copy, to send it my way as a Christmas gift, Kwanzaa present, Tet treat, or any other excuse to send me music in the post.

Anyway, go snag that new mclusky record, fam. It's well worth the price of admission.

Discogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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