If you’re not familiar with The Fall – and that’s perfectly
understandable, given that they have had a grand total of zero albums or
singles that have charted on Billboard’s American pop charts in their 38 years
and 31 studio albums of existence – their best-regarded album, 1985’s This
Nation’s Saving Grace might be the right place to start. But one might also
consider before starting it that no fewer than two of my co-workers have
expressed disdain for the band, one saying that all the songs sound the same,
the other calling them the very “definition of abrasive.” And please note that
they’re really not wrong – it’s one of the things the band’s fans like about
them. British tastemaker DJ John Peel called them his favorite band of all time
and noted: “They are always different; they are always the same.” Also please
consider that the band’s career-defining 2004 “hits” collection is entitled 50,000
Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong (parodying the famous Elvis Presley compilation and
dividing his fan base by a factor of a thousand) and it should be clear going
in that this group is a very specialized taste.
But those 50,000 fans – and I’m
definitely one of them alongside Peel – are a dedicated lot and have chosen
this album by consensus as the band’s defining album, a great balance of their
art punk impulses with a more accessible edge even if some may slightly prefer
the punkier and more abrasive earlier material, or the band’s recent albums
since that compilation was released, the last few of which are as solid as
anything they’ve released over the decades. This one finds them in a middle
period in which their always-experimental ideas are tempered with a more
prominent pop element. Most fans call this period “The Brix Years” after guitarist/songwriter
Brix Smith, who married the band’s leader Mark E. Smith in 1983, joining the
band through several albums in the 80’s until the pair divorced in 1989.
Comparing the pre-Brix years with
this album finds the earlier material rawer and harsher, but the approach is
the same – the band finds a groove, sometimes rocking, sometimes more jagged,
often with a prominent bass line up top, and vamps while Mark E. rants and
harangues over the top, and sometimes there are decorations of melody or sound
effects (but don’t count on it). Some call his lyrical approach poetry but in
reading the lyrics on their own, it’s clear that Smith is less interested in
the wordplay of poetry than discrete stream of consciousness ideas, instead
evoking an idea without ever really pinning down much in the way of concrete
details, dancing around a subject rather than nailing it down. Oh – and
repeating. The friend here who said their songs “all sound the same” (like
that’s a bad thing!) failed to note that their typical approach includes five
or ten or a dozen or a hundred repetitions of an idea, either a musical
phrase/riff or a lyrical slogan. The band pounds a riff into your head while
Mark E. does the same with a vocal – the song “What You Need” here repeats that
phrase forty times in 4:49 and interjects the things you might need around it,
including “an oven mitt,” “a bit of Iggy Stooge,” and “slippery shoes for your
horrible feet.” In fact, the very first song that kicks off 50,000 Fall Fans
Can’t Be Wrong is entitled “Repetition” – talk about truth in advertising!
Elsewhere on the record we have the
equally well-titled “Bombast” in which Mark E. states to “those who dare mix
real life with politics” that they shall “feel the wrath of my bombast” over
the harsh, paired guitars and pounding bass and drums making the very sound he
claims. The first half of the record builds towards the great tunes that close
out the LP’s first side – “Spoilt Victorian Child,” a rant directed at the
person indicated in the title that’s also the catchiest (and punkiest)(and
funniest) thing here, and the keyboard-heavy and Brix-hooked “L.A.” in which
Mark E. intones the letters of the title for most of the song over a dancy riff
before Brix comes in with the mocking, spaced-out sounding phrase “This is my
happening and it freaks me out!” The album’s flip side kicks off with one of
the all-time great blasts that the band ever generated in “Gut of the
Quantifier” which pounds out a relentless and driving rhythm and then
repeatedly works in great dynamic builds up to explosive climaxes as the rest
of the band kicks back in. It moves through “Paint Work,” which is the
strangest thing here – a mellow groove repeatedly disrupted by some kind of
flute-like keyboard sounds that feel more like mellotron than actual woodwinds.
The story that Mark E. Smith accidentally recorded over portions of the song at
home sounds about right. And then the regular part of the album moves toward a
close with “I Am Damo Suzuki,” an homage to the German art-rock band Can and
their one-time lead singer Suzuki. It’s built out of several pieces of
different Can songs – most notably the rhythms from Tago Mago’s “Oh
Yeah” – and has Mark E. delivering lines imagining himself as the Japanese
singer cut loose in acid-drenched Germany in the 70’s making sense of the music
and the culture. It closes out with “To NK Roachment: Yarbles,” a musical
bookend to the opening track “Mansion” which adds a lyrics partially copped
from Lou Reed to that instrumental intro.
But that’s not all – on CD the band
has added in single cuts and stray tracks contemporary to the recording of the
album that flesh out (and is several cases, improve) the sound of the record
proper. True to the Fall’s non-conformist attitudes, two are inserted in the
middle of the record, three at the end. “Vixen” and “Petty (Thief) Lout” don’t
make a huge impact, but “Couldn’t Get Ahead” and the Gene Vincent cover
“Rollin’ Dany” are both superb and the single A-side that closes the CD,
“Cruiser’s Creek” just may be the most accessible and catchy thing on the
entire disc – it’s one of their all-time best and most-loved songs.
So if you’re new to the band, try
this out. But understand that those hardcore 50K fans could point you to
probably a dozen other albums and a hundred other songs you should check out.
Note also that fully 8 of these 16 tracks have placed in the top ten items of a
poll I’ve run for several years now on Rateyourmusic.com (there are a lot of
ties there of course), and that “Gut of the Quantifier” is inexplicably not one
of them. Note that Pitchfork listed This Nation's Saving Grace as 13th
best album of the 1980s in a 2002 article (two other Fall albums also placed
lower in the charts, one Brix-era, one earlier). And note also that if you
happen to become their 50,001st fan, you’re likely hooked for life
and on the track of buying dozens of albums and for that I apologize and also
welcome you to the cult. Of course if you’re one of those 50,000 fans, you
already know this.
- Patrick Brown
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