The Fall Album: “Reformation Post TLC”

After another band implosion, this time on the 2006 American tour that found the musicians that had solidly performed on the last two studio discs "Country on the Click/ The Real New Fall Album" and "Fall Heads Roll" abandon leader Mark E. Smith and his wife keyboardist Elena Poulou in the Arizona desert, the re-formed (one estimate for the 45th time) group gives this their 26th or 27th studio recording a stripped down, brittle, and suitably lean sound akin more to their lesser-heard mid-90s efforts. That is, lots of straightforward (relatively speaking if you know the Fall) guitar and keys and drums arrangements in staccato, chugging, playful, or lurching styles. MES out in front from the first lines of song one ranting again at past members' perfidity. MES picking up with a half-dozen or so decent songs that admittedly cut some of the last two studio disc's flourishes and sonic assaults for a less dramatic, more workmanlike, disciplined, and perhaps more modest approach to the music. It draws less attention to itself here.

This by contrast places more emphasis on MES. His lyrics are actually more comprehensible than they have been for the past four or so discs this decade. His autodidact charm and cutting irony balance with him simply having fun taking the piss out of his listeners, who, if like me, should know better than to expect, as I foolishly do each album, a solid and consistent set of songs. Instead, it's a familiar pattern that the last fifteen years at least has established. Not a rut by any means, but this is the template MES and crew use to work within.

First part of the album solid. American cover version: this time an appropriate, given the tour debacle that led to this band's genesis, "White Line Fever" by Merle Haggard. Accusations of speed and drink were lobbed at MES by his former band mates, and the current band was hired on the spot, more or less, from the opening support act. Two of the current band are from LA group Darker My Love. They recorded this album later last year in LA and England/ It lacks "The Usher" from the earlier British release, but adds four tour videos. A no-nonsense approach makes this a respectable if not astonishing later effort from The Fall. which is these days as MES puts it built on the model of himself as football coach and the players his hired hands who do what they're told.

Where in frustratingly endearing Fall style the trail wanders off is with "Insult Song," which continues the first track's invective but with a looser attention to songcraft. Then, with the ten-minute plus "Das Boot," MES' admiration for Krautrock does not prevent this tune from endlesly postponing its resolution, going on endlessly. I get the joke, but it wears out its welcome well before the marathon's ended. The next two songs also match a Fall template, that of albums weakening in their latter third section. "Outro," logically called, does try to rally the spirit, but this is an album that I predict will sound better live.

Production, and I realize the nature of such on Fall efforts, is compressed. Instruments muffle. The highs and lows, the flourishes and bombast, are lacking in a more consistent balance but one that tends too to smother what needs escape and air to shout about. Still, in concert the nuances should emerge much better, and I anticipate-- for once!-- a live album of these songs will (although it's a long shot given the "guy's track record") enliven these songs to better effect. When, as "Horse & Carriage," you base your alt-history fevered vision on such overlooked admirables as Arthur Machen, you are listening to a band under MES' always entertaining autodidact rants and gnomic chants that deserves attention, for more than the tour antics and the annual line-up shuffles.