It took me a long time to love The Fall. Oh sure, I listened to them a lot in a budding-rock-nerd, take-your-vegetables kind of way — "Because John Peel said so, that's why! Now go to your room until you understand that Pavement’s 'Two States' is totally derivative." But I didn't quite get it.
Part of the problem was that I started in the deep end of the pool: Palace of Swords Reversed, a collection of the band's early-'80s singles. The songs collected on Palace are now among my all-time faves — and many are represented on 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong, the new two-disc Fall retrospective — but at the time, except for "Totally Wired" and a vague feeling that "Kicker Conspiracy" was about sports, I could understand about every 15th word and basically had no idea what this Mark E. Smith character was going on about.
So next I figure I'll get their new album, which at the time was The Infotainment Scan on Matador, 1993. Is this even the same band? It's like a techno record, if techno included pop ballads and Lee Perry cover songs. Does not compute....
Such was the plight of the nascent Fall fan, with only 458489 A Sides,
a great collection of the band's best Beggars Banquet singles, offering more
of a starting point or anything approaching an overview (and even then, as
with Palace,
you're only getting one Fall incarnation). Somehow I found my way to the songs
that — poof! — unlocked The Fall so I could fall for 'em, and today,
if not a fanatic ... well, let's face it, I'm probably a fanatic.
The Fall's strange appeal can be summed up in a couple
of paradoxes. The first is that they record the same
songs over and over again in surprisingly original
ways. The Fall and their ever-shifting lineup, anchored
by Smith, really only work from a few templates — the
Sloganeering Stomper ("Kicker Conspiracy," "Rowche
Rumble"), the Droning Jam ("The Man Whose Head
Expanded"), the Big Pop Single ("C.R.E.E.P.," "Touch
Sensitive") — each with its own set of Fall-specific
conventions. Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon's guitar
playing often consists of only a couple of repeating
two- or three-note riffs, and sometimes the bass and
keyboards follow along, each of them slightly off the
beat but lurching as one. Aside from giving Smith
plenty of room to do his thing (more on that later),
the band’s minimalist palette can be infinitely
twisted and tweaked to refract everything from
rockabilly to techno to The Kinks. "Mr. Pharmacist,"
their cover of The Other Half’s Nuggets-era
shouter, sounds pretty much exactly like the original,
yet it transforms into a Fall song so thoroughly that
it's a fan favorite, still in their live set 18 years
later.
Paradox No. 2: Mark E. Smith shows true dedication in
the pursuit of creative nihilism. Always discontented
("I hate the countryside so much" is a key phrase from
The Fall’s new one), Smith punctures targets with
offhand accuracy and finishes the barbs with his nasal
"uhh." Whether cryptic and nonsensical or bizarrely
specific — "Turn those bloody, blimey Space Invaders
off — uhh!" — Smith's delivery takes a little getting
used to, but it's the instantly recognizable thread
running through every song The Fall have recorded.
Smith especially seems to relish twisting the knife on
his core audience. "Hip Priest," from 1982's Hex
Enduction Hour, prefigured LCD Soundsystem's
"Losing My Edge" by two decades — Smith mocks the
pronouncement-on-high rock-crit smartasses with lines
like "I took my last clean dirty shirt out of the
wardrobe! 'Cause I'm a hip priest!" Of course, the song
has the residual effect of installing Smith as the hip
pope, with the clean-dirty-shirted acolytes hanging on
every word.
So, now, though, back to the formidable monster
catalog and how to navigate it. Enter stage right:
50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong, the best way
to get from the clattering manifesto of 1978's
Repetition to 2003's Green-Eyed Loco Man
and hit all high points between. The Fall have
released roughly an album a year during that span, and
50,000 Fall Fans ... pulls about one song from
each, filling in with key singles like "Cruiser's
Creek." One impressive thing about this approach is
that the second disc, covering 1986 to the present, is
only a bit less enjoyable than disc one — The Fall
have been consistently good for 25 years! (Maybe not
album-length consistent, but still. Insane.) You could
even do 50,000 Fall Fans Vol. 2, with a
different song from each album, and the thing would be
almost as great as this one. ("Glam-Racket" ... "Slang
King" ... "Jerusalem" ...)
Who knows, they might need a Vol. 3 by the time
The Fall call it quits. Smith is still touring with
newer/younger/hungrier Fall cohorts — appearing last
summer in New York, he looked like a pissed-off
British version of Johnny Cash, declining to take off
his leather jacket despite the 115-degree weather
inside the Knitting Factory’s sold-out sweatbox. The
band still cranks out nearly an album a year, although
the records haven't been getting released in the
United States for about six. So it's a welcome
development that the U.S. indie label Narnack picked
up The Real New Fall LP — the title is
apparently a jibe at downloaders of a leaked early
version — and got it into stores a few months after
its release in Europe.
In a process that started on 2002's The
Unutterable, this album skips back a couple of
eras and pumps out more raw-sounding music than The
Fall had been doing in the 1990s, with a skein of
electronic manipulation adding texture but not
providing the main point. Smith's voice is
manipulated, too, becoming a digitized growl of
distortion on "Mad Mock Goth": "We take Viagra and go
to Camber Sands/ Our shirts are well out of our pants.
Mad mock goth — uhh!" For most of the album he's
properly worked up, but the more subdued tracks — the
dark whispers of "Janet vs. Johnny" or the country
click of "Houston" — are no less satisfying. The only
real misstep is "Portugal," which seems a little too
on-the-nose in its apparent airing of a complaint
letter about The Fall's bad touring behavior.
So while not breaking new ground — a near impossible
expectation given the amount of ground The Fall has
already broken — The Real New Fall LP is a
strong indication that Mark E. Smith is nowhere near
finished. Like The Fall said on that first single,
"The repetition's in the music and we're never gonna
lose it."
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