Icon: The Fall
Roughly 75 people have been members of the Fall over the last three decades or so, but only one of them has been in every lineup: inimitable vocalist/lyricist/ranter Mark E. Smith, whose singular and monomaniacal vision drives the band. Smith’s a bristling, hyperliterate, deeply eccentric presence, with a thick Manchester accent and a permanent scowl directed at a world that can’t keep up with him; he’s also got an ear for a riff like nobody’s business. From their earliest days as discontents of punk rock hegemony, the Fall evolved into a spiky hedgehog of a band in the early ’80s, kicked in the back door to the new wave party later that decade, opened themselves up to electronics and wild stylistic experimentation in the ’90s, and have taken on a heavier, tougher sound in the ’00s.
POP-STOCK, TRY MY POP-STOCK
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The Fall's two brief, contentious stints on the British label Rough Trade between 1979 and 1983, anthologized here, yielded some of their freakiest and most potent records, including a series of impossibly abrasive, impossibly catchy singles. The post-punk landmark "Totally Wired" finds Mark E. Smith frantically evoking a scattered, headlong buzz; "The Man Whose Head Expanded" is a sci-fi epic torn down to a few evocative phrases; "Wings" is a hysterical, paranoid time-travel fantasy with a guitar hook that burns like a lit cigarette. Some of the best material here comes from the Slates EP, whose bizarre sonics are as much of a statement of purpose as the songs themselves, especially the two-minute spy-movie gallop "Prole Art Threat."
UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!
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Having weighed "punk" in the balance and found it nowhere near messy and nasty enough, the Fall made a second album that shoved conventional ideas of fidelity into the dustbin of history. Mark E. Smith shrieks, gnashes and squeals, the band's way out of tune, the mix is trebly sludge and it sounds fantastic. Contempt for pop normalcy is one of Smith's big lyrical themes here (although the band does work up a raging approximation of rockabilly on "Dice Man"); the other one is his fascination with H.P. Lovecraft's evocations of unimaginable horror, especially on "Spectre Vs. Rector," which seems to be about a disastrously failed exorcism. Dragnet also introduced the team of guitarist Craig Scanlon and Steve Hanley, who'd be the instrumental core of the Fall for the next 15 years.
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The Fall's fourth, darkest and densest album is in fact exactly an hour long, with a two-drummer lineup grinding out repetitive, churning riffs while Smith declaims knotty, furious, half-abstract phrases about Nazis, a bitter priest, desolate English landscapes and being "humbled in Iceland." It's effectively rock as a way of getting people to listen to poetry readings. But the poetry is amazing, and so is the rock they'd invented a musical and lyrical idiom that sounded unlike anything before it, and as hard as the album can be to take on a first listen, it opens up like a dark flower with repeated exposure. Hex Enduction Hour had an enormous influence on the American post-punk scene Pavement covered its blistering opener, "The Classical."
WHAT’S A COMPUTER?
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After Mark and Brix Smith split up (and she left the Fall), he rebounded with an album that's audibly trying to find its way in the alternative-rock landscape of 1990, including a couple of surprisingly fantastic collaborations with dance producers Coldcut. (He also replaced her on guitar with Martin Bramah, who'd left the band back in 1979.) Extricate's highlight is probably a spittle-flecked cover of '60s German proto-punks the Monks' "I Hate You" (as "Black Monk Theme"), but M.E.S. spends the whole album expanding the band's stylistic palette, even revealing something close to a sensitive side on "Bill Is Dead."
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The '90s were a rough time for the Fall, with extensive lineup churn and a lot of half-realized projects. Weirdly, the side-projects, singles tracks, covers and castoffs collected here amount to a fine if all-over-the-place album. Mark E. Smith always seems to get a creative jolt out of collaborations outside the Fall (like the Von Sdenfed album from 2007); his guest appearances on D.O.S.E.'s "Plug Myself In," Inspiral Carpets' "I Want You" and Long Fin Killie's "The Heads of Dead Surfers" are delirious with power. The Marshall Suite-era bonus track "The Real Life of Crying Marshall" is one of the band's most successful hybrids of electronics and raw riffing, and the reggae covers "Why Are People Grudgeful?" and "Kimble" point out the Fall's relationship to the weirdest Jamaican deejay records. Only a guest shot on Tackhead's remake of the first Fall single, "Repetition," falls flat: Smith's never been much for revisiting the past.
GOOD EVENING, WE ARE THE FALL, AS IN FROM HEAVEN!
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The three epochal gigs the Fall played in Iceland in 1981 inspired that country's rock scene for years afterward; they returned for this storming 1983 show, at which they previewed most of the songs that would turn up later that year on Perverted By Language (including "Garden," most of whose last three minutes consist of Smith repeatedly shrieking "A Jew on a motorbike-uh!"), delivered an unabridged rendition of the elliptical single "The Man Whose Head Expanded," and rampaged through the never-studio-recorded 12-minute epic "Backdrop." As with most of the Fall's live albums, it's got indifferent sound quality and a blistering performance Mark E. Smith's famous habit of overenunciation propels his lyrics through the band's barbed-wire wall.
