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Live at the Witch Trials

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The Fall

 
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Live at the Witch Trials

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Avg: 4.0 (62 ratings)

The auspicious start of post-punk's longest-running ranter.

  • We Say...

    Review by Simon Reynolds

    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 white line too many.

    Smith's rapid-fire snarl and see-through-you sneer have all the hallmarks of the "speed rap," and that's probably what he's referring to in the song title "Crap Rap 2." (Although some have actually argued that Smith's unique style of half-spoken delivery is an authentic English equivalent to rapping!) In that song, Smith famously defined the Fall as "the white crap that talks back" — proles who refused to buckle down and accept their allotted place at the bottom of the British class system. It's a mission statement that pungently distils both the group's spirit of insolent defiance and the crudely hewn but indomitable force of their music.

  • They Say...

    Review by Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

    That the first Fall album in a near endless stream would not only not sound very punk at all but would be a downright pleasant listen at the start (thanks to Yvonne Pawlett's electric piano on "Frightened") seems perfectly in keeping with Smith's endlessly contrary mind. His inimitable drawl/moan and general vision of the universe (idiots are everywhere and idiotic things are rampant) similarly sprawls all over the music -- there's no question who this is or whose band it is as well. That said, most of Live at the Witch Trials is co-written with Martin Bramah, whose guitar work here is noticeably much more inclined to chime and ring instead of brutally scratching away like Craig Scanlon's awesome work would soon do. Bramah's not just there to sound tuneful, though, and the killer Marc Riley/Karl Burns rhythm section both keeps up the energy and provides surprising grooves. On chugging tracks like "Two Steps Back," it's not hard to tell Smith's Krautrock fandom is coming into play. With Pawlett's keyboards providing a pretty garage kick on top of it all, the result is an all-around treat. Brilliantly scabrous tracks are everywhere, one of the most memorable being "Rebellious Jukebox," simultaneously one of the most tuneful and aggressive songs from the early lineup, Smith pouring it on along with the band as a whole. The driving funk of "Music Scene," meanwhile, redefines misanthropy (and more) with a particularly central Smith target in mind. "No Xmas for John Quays," meanwhile, almost establishes the Fall formula on its own -- Smith chanting and yelling over a quick, semi-rockabilly shamble and attack punctuated with unexpected stops and starts. Note -- the Cog Sinister CD re-release of the album, in keeping with similar perverse reissues in the Fall's back catalog, is mastered directly from vinyl, and more than once sounds it.

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