eMusic Review
In one early song, the Fall's frontman Mark E. Smith exalted "the three R's: repetition, repetition, repetition." The Manchester post-punk band got their schooling in trance-inducing monotony from the Velvet Underground and Can, but on Live at the Witch Trials, their 1979 debut album, you can hear Television, too, in Martin Bramah's spidery, needling guitar lines, while Yvonne Pawlett's glue-on-fingers keyboards make you flash on punkadelic '60s garage bands like the Seeds. Now and then, on slower songs like "Two Steps Back," there's also a sense of disorientation and strangeness that recalls the early Doors.
For Smith, seeing the world through askew eyes wasn't an affliction, but a reprieve from the crushing mundanity of life in a Northern English factory town, evoked here on "Industrial Estate," an uproarious rant about an area of Manchester zoned for heavy industry, where the ground-down workers numb themselves with Valium. To escape this living death, Smith and company turned to their own chemical remedies. "Underground Medecin" is a paean to amphetamine: "I found a reason not to die," rejoices Smith, "the spark inside." "Frightened," conversely, evokes the downside of drugs: in this case, the racing thoughts, sleepless sweats and twitchy paranoia caused by snorting one… read more »
