![]() But Fall Heads Roll also features surprising displays of bonhomie - on the spirited romp through the Move’s 1968 garage-rock nugget “I Can Hear the Grass Grow,” you can almost hear Smith smile. Building upon the promise of 2003’s The Real New Fall LP, Fall Heads Roll flexes a sinewy muscle the band hadn’t worked since the early ’80s, with tracks like “Blindness” and “What About Us” instantly crashing the canon of the Fall’s most menacing songs. Two decades and infinite personnel changes removed from the Fall’s ’80s chart infiltrations, Smith had a new wife/creative foil (keyboardist Elena Poulou) at his side and a renewed vigor. ![]() ![]() Even at their most omnipotent and grandiose, the Fall still swing like a chain-wielding street gang on “Spoilt Victorian Child” and “Gut of the Quantifier,” but This Nation’s violent outbursts are balanced by moments of understated cool, like Brix’s desert-twang tease “Vixen” and the absolutely sublime lo-fi drift of “Paintwork.”īest line: “What have you got in that paper bag? / Is it a dose of Vitamin C? / Ain’t got no time for Western medicine/ I am Damo Suzuki” (“I Am Damo Suzuki”) This Nation’s Saving Grace is the creative summit of their union, the rare Fall album that feels less like a jumble of tracks and more of a cinematic, conceptually structured piece (complete with the ominous, scene-setting intro “Mansion” and psychedelic interstitial “L.A.”). The mid-’80s were the Fall’s “pop” period, thanks in large part to the arrival of Smith’s American wife Brix, who brought a more tuneful sensibility to the fore by countering her husband’s rants with cheerleader-worthy chants. Thanks to the addition of second drummer Karl Burns, Hex Enduction Hour captures a band on the warpath, powered by a rhythm section that rumbles and crushes like a tank and a lead mouthpiece shooting out barbs like bullets, making this the go-to Fall record for Stephen Malkmus and Buffalo Bill alike.īest line: “You won’t find anything more ridiculous / than this new profile razor unit / made with the highest British attention / to the wrong detail” (“The Classical”) But on the brink of death, the Fall found everlasting life. Frustrated by the band’s lack of success and its deteriorating relationship with their label, Rough Trade, Smith expected the Fall’s fourth album to deep-six the group. But Hex Enduction Hour is the sound of the Fall playing as if it were their last album. In light of Smith’s passing last week, 2017’s unsteady-as-she-goes New Facts Emerge will go down as the Fall’s unintended swan song. (Sure, you could start with a compilation like 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong, but those are for tourists, and we know how Mark E. If you’ve read all the best- song- list tribute posts from last week and think you’re ready for full-album indoctrination, use this step-by-step guide to acclimatize yourself to the wonderful and frightening world of the Fall, from their most accessible work to their most inscrutable. Top 40, and Smith was enough of a national treasure to get invited onto the BBC to read out football scores (if not quite world-famous enough to warrant a last-minute addition to last Sunday’s Grammy memorial reel).Īll of which is to say the Fall’s discography becomes a less-daunting prospect if you take the boiling-frog approach. #Torrent stephen malkmus crack#Of those 31 albums, 10 actually managed to crack the U.K. 1 reason for music-critic thesaurus searches on the word “cantankerous,” the Fall could mold their metamorphic punk into something resembling a pop song on occasion. And on top of it all, Smith unleashed a Pollock-like splatter of words that blurred the lines between street-level documentary and dystopian sci-fi, capped with a signature-uh vocal-uh tic-uh that rendered his lyrics as post-punk pig Latin. ![]() The Fall were simultaneously the most primitive and evolved band to come out of punk, their sound an ever-mutating grotesquerie of roughed-up rockabilly, debased garage-rock, corroded Krautrock, soccer-hooligan chants, and, diseased dance music. #Torrent stephen malkmus full#(You can scroll down their Spotify albums list for a full 30 seconds and still only make it to the mid-1990s.) But the Fall didn’t just release an overwhelming amount of music they released an overwhelming amount of overwhelming music. Smith coughed up 31 proper studio albums - and this is to say nothing of the EPs, live albums, compilations, box sets, and outtakes collections that seemed to spontaneously multiply like water-doused mogwais. Well, long before Spotify was a thing, fans of the Fall were already all too familiar with that feeling.īetween forming the Fall in 1976 up to his death last week, ringleader Mark E. Too much music, not enough time to listen to it, and not nearly enough brain capacity to process it all. There’s been much talk in recent years about how the advent of streaming services - and the limitless listening possibilities they present - has induced a paralysis of choice. ![]()
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