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How can you justify Mezzanine as their breakthrough album? What about the wide popular appeal and critical success of Blue Lines and Protection before it?
I was genuinely surprised When they did something is cool is this chose to do it with Mezzanine, Blue Lines is probably one of the best albums ever written in my not very humble opinion. That was truly groundbreaking.
It depends on which part of the world you're from. I'd have thought that anyone from the UK would be saying Blue Lines.
Presumably because Mezzanine was thir first album to chart number 1
I think it charted at number 1... because they had already broken through with the previous albums, so enough people knew about it and were anticipating it.
Being a foreign student in the UK during the 90s I loved the whole trip hop movement (Portishead & Tricky included) and I have to add my vote for Blue Lines and Protection. They might think that Mezzanine is their best album, but I beg to differ (along with many others).
Mezzanine is the only album of theirs I could identify by sight/sound/name. Seems like a reasonable assertion to me.
15M would be listenable with a state of the art audio codec like Opus, but not transparent.

15Mb for 63.5 minutes would translate to 32 Kbit/s. Which is pretty low, but I'm going to compress it with Opus and listen to it. Apparently there have been some improvements on low bitrate speech coding which would make it good for saving podcasts or text to speech files.

I used to save some space on my PocketPC by re-compressing podcasts to wma acelp.net in the previous century. ‎

Growing up, Mezzanine and The Fragile were the two albums that shaped my musical tastes growing up. As cool as this is, I don't see how its practical, even for an archival purpose.
I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t inject the DNA strands back into their own bodies.