But, really, after a few bars of ramshackle take up of the rhythm and bass riff, the opener, The Classical starts rocking like everything around it. And The Fall, track by track, start sounding like a band. It's the same band (almost) as on the first three. Riffs on loud but clean guitars, non-rock drumming and bass that is either melodic or indistinguishable from the tom toms. This time, someone opened a window and all that is clear ... er.
"I've never felt better in my life," they sing with nasal sarcasm at the end of a harangue born of a four chord progression that hammers on. Because of that insistence on the progression it takes on a kind of drunken take on Sympathy for the Devil (different chords, I hasten to add) with a spiteful omission of the chorus. A big acidic rant at consumerism or the advertising that fuels it or even the buying habit that has replaced culture. Maybe even a shambling restatement of The Saints' Know Your Product. The thing is, that, for all its teetering chaos, The Classical is compelling and even catchy.
If you remember the early Fall records rather than listen to them now the sheer riffy rock of it might surprise you. Yes, there's a lot of the legacy of German avant-rockers in all first wave Fall but even those volk knew the power of compulsion. Faust's reverse taunt track Krautrock is an onslaught on a single chord but it's engaging as anything a stadium rock act of its time ever produced.
Jawbone and the Air Rifle bangs in the four on floor rock that the band did happily. Smith's narrated account is a strange horror story of an impotent middle aged man who takes his anger out on the local rabbits (he's referred to in the song as rabbit killer). He takes a chip out of a mausoleum, waking the local curse and deteriorates thereafter, hallucinating pagan imagery. His appetite for the meat he used to hunt vanished he settles into a slow death by starvation. The last section is told against a slower minor-key vamp before the jolly jig riff that has served as a chorus throughout the song.
Hip Priest begins with guitar harmonics, a jazzy ride cymbal taps out 6/8 rhythm, slow modal guitars and Smith singing a falsetto figure: "He is not appreciated." Occasional small outbreaks of chords and bass resettle into the slow shuffle until the oddly folky 6/8 roll picks up and sticks with the groove. The unappreciated is the self-appointed pontiff rock writer from Sounds or the NME, whose word can kill careers, whose ear is only sought when the seeker is well past it. A terminally spitting indictment of the profession but delivered with calm deliberation. Deadly.
Fortress/Deer Park is a garage chordy riff taken to dissonance after an intro that uses the same cute plinky Casio rhythm as Trio used on their still funny minimalist hit Da Da Da. Images of the ugly end of nights out and touring alternate with the plea: "Have you been to the English Deer Park? It's a large type artist ranch..." Anywhere that produces some cool thing gets stretched into hallowed ground. The Fall were from Manchester which, by that time, was the place where he, Ian Curtis, walked. The litany towards the end about people being disappointed by their own preconceptions about bands they go to see still makes me laugh.
Mere Pseud Mag Ed pits Smith against a spiky guitar and drums grind as he verbally slaps the face of society magazines with their ostentation and pretence. Little more to say on it really, does what it says on the cover.
Winter, on the other hand, is an epic with a weird depressing story and was so long that they had to put it over two sides, end of A, beginning of B. Weekend had done this on La Variete with the instrumental A Life in the Day. Neither that nor this were joined when released on a CD which would have allowed both as a single one, but, yeah that would have gone against what they were to begin with. I'll treat both Winter (Hostel Maxi) and Winter 2 as one song. A pedestrian rhythm with a bass insisting on a low note however it might briefly stray. A clean guitar lashing high chords. Eventually a Casio organ adding spare highlights. It's not easy to make all the lyrics out without assistance but there is a story there. The local mad kid goes about his day, challenging passers by with odd declarations as an alcoholic variously gets over his hangovers or waits in the library until the pub opens again. One winters day the kid walks past the drunk's place at the moment that the drunk's soul leaves him and flies out the window into the kid. Then the drunk says to the bewildered recipient some heart wrenching words: "I just looked around and my youth, it was sold." Courtesy winter. Thing is, this song is compelling. It's a kind of walking drone but it's also mesmerising. You have to listen to the entire thing. If you had the record, you had to get up and turn it over. I can imagine the ghost of Mark E. Smith giggling at the sight of that, especially at the snake-oil buyers who think vinyl is the newly resurrected true church of music appreciation.
Just Step S'ways starts with the best riff The Fall ever recorded. It rises through a modal/raga influenced scale and falls back with a pair of finalising downward notes. You just want to hear it over and over which is why they play it that way. Now and then there's a big loud break but the riff comes back which is kind of the opposite of the plea of the lyric which goes: "Just step sideways out from this world, today." But this is less about smelling roses than wrapping your scarf around your nose to keep out the perfumed aircon of the culture. If this hadn't been The Fall but U2 or The Police this riff would have been the centrepiece of a stadium stormer. It's much better as it is-uh.
Who Makes the Nazis starts with a yell of its title that gives way to a circular riff on guitar and bass with guitar harmonics and a half time drum pattern. Eventually, an oafish drooling wordless backing vocal comes in under the lyric which repeats the question and answers itself with elements of the culture like TV commentators or superb Smithian images like "motels like three split-level mirages". Smith played a voice recording from a Dictaphone right into the mic, letting it distort to add noise but also to invoke the kind of loud hailer politics the lyric addresses.
Iceland was recorded in Iceland after a small number of gigs the band played in Reykjavik. Smith murmurs an intro over a curious blend of ukulele and vamping piano. Viking imagery of runes and battle. But this is Mark E. Smith so he also recounts a moment when he slipped on the floor of a cafe and was annoyed that no one seemed to bat an eyelid. The colourful non-sequiturs run by with the refrain of getting humbled in Iceland (that pratfall in the cafe gave him a useful image for this one). This is much more a personal thing with me than it will be a generally accepted impression but the constant bouncing rhythm on acoustic instruments and the far more serious drumming, right to the gentle détente to the clean finish, this one reminds me of the instrumental version of Sing This All Together on the Rolling Stones Satanic Majesties record. I don't think they are copying it (if anything it just sounds like an idea that came out of a jam, but the association is a pleasing one. A little oasis before the end.
The end comes in the form of the longest song on the album, And This Day. A stamping and fractured 6/8 beat on the drums and an insistent minor figure on the bass are garnished by a distorted organ as Smith declares stress in a long, long string of images of travel and claustrophobia, of isolation and paranoia. Is it about touring? If it is it's about as far from Helen Wheels as you could get. The instrumental passages do not change the onslaught of the imposing rhythm and its interventions but add bursting stars of feedback and the organ can take on a strange similarity to a choir. When Smith comes back in with the the chanted title his voice is flush with the wash of the instruments. It's exhausting but exhilarating; the bump as the airliner's tyres touch the tarmac at the home airport. There's no fade, just a dissipation and end. That's the album.
People should still be listening to The Fall. They could take the easy way in with a compilation of the mid and late '80s singles which can get very catchy but, really, what they need to do is find one of the first eight or so albums, the earlier the better, and listen to them until the music and the words feel familiar. They will, and it should only take a few listens. All eras of pop music have surfaces that look glassy and still and all of those eras have undercurrents and shards where music like this is made. The post punk era was longer than punk but was absorbed like everything else eventually, was a moment when music like this was appreciated deeply. I don't mean millions of people bought it, I mean those who did and went to the gigs did so to feel something beyond their ken. This is not limited to the early '80s, you can find it now, new, but a dose of this approach that does not care if you like it, has no American-style eyes on the prize and was from a time when the push against that kind of showbiz felt like it was winning. It wasn't and it lost like all the other challenges. That failure gives us bullshit like The Good Charlotte whose publicity was all tatts and piercings but who sounded like mid-'80s MoR.
I didn't even have this one on cassette but I loved hearing The Fall on radio. More than The Birthday Party or Foetus or ... or anyone else, the Smith brigade of modular line-ups with the rockiest anti-rock on the face of the deep cut through everything else, shaming its listeners for being fans of anything else. Whatever flight you took to OMD skies or submarine to Joy Division oceanic trenches you could always get back home with The Fall. The best bit was that wasn't because they told it like it was but mixed that with wild dream logic dadaism and mighty riffing goodness. And none of it had the self-consciously weirdo vibe of an Oingo Boingo or Classix Nouveau (that's a cheap shot but it was fun to type). If you play or write songs and get plugged into a YouTube course on do-nots and always lists, listen to The Fall and it will be more relieving than a bowel prep laxative. You won't want to sound like them but you might feel like sounding like yourself.
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