Arcane shibboleths wasn’t necessarily the core of The Fall, but they were often the grist in the coal mill. I’ve bloody prevaricated on this review for yonks, which is ridiculous as it’s The Fall album I’ve probably listened to most since that fateful week in 1997 when I bought a record and was mildly outraged at what an incoherent mess it was.
I’m not really up for certain narratives of the Fall — like the idea that there’s good and bad periods, and all that — but this is the record that’s bang on the horns of “old Fall” — the vestiges of the band that made the records that guitar magazine pricks didn’t understand, but also didn’t understand enough to valorise — and The Fall that roughly saw out the last twenty years. Kind of. Insofar as Mark E Smith never managed to make another “cult” record like Hex Enduction Hour, but continued making better records. More obtuse.
So re: etc in relation to this here record etc etc — perhaps the music always that was best was the music that followed its own inscrutable logic. If you were going to pitch this record, you probably wouldn’t — it’s all sorts of a mess. Like, I genuinely hadn’t heard anything like it at the time; and it’s kind of coloured my thing about a lot of guitar music. tl;dr – there aren’t records this messy that aren’t also slack. And slack’s never a good look.“Hurricane Edwards” is SUCH a mess in a way that still makes me nauseous — as was Smiths’ wont, it’s clear he’s the only one playing that has an idea how it all fits together (giro Beefheart, but better and less wanky). There’s romps through the sort of garagey stuff we’re used to: “Old Gang”, with Julia Nagle‘s synths hitting the register that feels like wasps crawling through your aorta, “I’m a Mummy” being pretty much a straight-up garage deal, albeit recorded by actual piss.
There’s a thing I’ve bleated on about with Smith and the Fall in a few reviews on Freq where Smith is very good at this caprice of sounding superficially like he’s slapdash with recording but, on closer inspection, was quite the nuanced appreciator of timbre. And as a teenager, this was entirely revelatory — the “single” from this, “4 1/2 Inch”, apparently a hotchpotch of sessions with and without D.O.S.E, has some really crisp sounding drums (“what you’d best do… is get him to sit at the table… and play the fucking drum beat”), but vocals from all sorts of mics and dictaphones; everything about it is terrifying, not least the miasma of Smith very definitely complaining about lots of things concurrently. One of the only discernible lines “A nation… of idle gossips”.There’s a boring thing that people say about the Fall where the first album is always your favourite, but fuck off, prick.
This re-issue comes with the sort of usual re-issue tosh — remixes, alternate takes. Mildly interesting to hear what the PWL remix (apparently Pete Waterman let Smith record it at his studio), but not particularly necessary. I mean, if you’re a Fall collector you won’t give the beginnings of a fuck about whether this review persuades you, because you’ve probably noted the curious torque and cleanness of the vinyl re-issue. The liner notes are weirdly limp and lukewarm — not particularly effusive about the record and seemingly coming from a place of hurt. As I say, that narrative of the Fall doesn’t interest me, but it’s a terrific shame that the well-worn narrative around the NY Brownies show and Smith sacking / assaulting the band means that this record sort of got buried into a mire of journalism. And we all know that journalism, and all journalists, are literally the worst.YEAH SO YEAH what you need to know is that this is a super fucking weird record and basically for my money it’s why most guitar music is shit. The crucible of actually pushing the form without being a prize cunt about it. I am the recommend.
-Kev Nickells-
