Disco de The Fall: “This Nation's Saving Grace”

A raucous, rough and ready riot of garage rock from start to finish, 'This Nation' veers between the brash, unfinished amateurism of 'Bombast' and 'Spoilt Victorian child' to the highly produced and polished sound of 'LA' and 'Petty (thief) lout'. This is without doubt The Fall's finest sixty minutes, with Mark E Smith's vivid, twisted take on the everyday in overdrive (cf 'Couldn't get ahead's strange rant about queuing up for an aeroplane toilet; one of the few tracks with easily discernible lyrics).

Every song here is up to scratch, with none of the sloppy filler tracks of later albums. This nation's saving grace? Well, with this album The Fall come damn close.

I always thought this album could be compared to the effect of hallucinogenic drugs. You can't explain it to anyone, they just have to experience it. and what an experience it is. This album has that sound of "greatness" that only so few albums have. The lyrics are especially cool. "Who are the hitmakers, who are they really? How old are the stars really? "

Yeah you gotta hear it to believe it.

With those words, Mark E. Smith more or less sums up The Fall's entire aesthetic. Even when the music moved in a poppy direction, Smith's rambling bursts of vitrol always remained front and center. After the pop-influenced, but no less brilliant Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace returns the band to a more atonal direction, one which blends the shiny textures of the "Brix-era" with the feedback-drenched cacophony of Hex Enduction Hour. "Bombast," "Barmy," and "My New House" are all The Fall doing The Fall and doing it without sounding the least bit redundant. There's even the synth-jittery "L.A.," a minimalistic piece of pop that only Smith and his crew could pull off. What perhaps makes The Fall so significant is that their layout was ripe for repeating itself, yet they always sounded vital. Maybe it's also for the sub-avant-garde experiments like "Paint Work" and "I Am Damo Suzuki." But The Fall still sound unquestionably original today, not just because music is in an awful state, but because nobody can touch what they did.

This is not an album that grows on you. This is an album that you grow INTO to fully appreciate the scope of its work. Featuring the same seriousness of effort as their previous and also fully-Brix-collaborative "The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall", this album has its diddies too that reach out and grab you right away, like "Spoilt Victorian Child" and "L.A.," however the previous album had more of that throughout the paintwork. This one you have to stick with more in order to dig the full shag of the thing. This is not for wasted trials in meeting the artiste below you, but works in the other direction and is thus well worth the meeting. Like the song "Barmy," The Fall isn't just satisfied here to find a killer groove and roll with it till the end. No, they have another side to show, and so "Barmy" flip-shifts trajectory, diving deep and dirty to a novel molestation of your soul. "I Am Damo Suzuki" is another song that at first sounds simply different and on par with a Fall average, but a few listens and you become accustomed to the foreign land of copted-Oriental rockabilly, you get in with the native cultures, and its true essence takes hold of your heart in comprehension.

One issue I have with the 1997 re-issue I got is that they fragged the order somewhat. It's true that, due to the still lame tradition back then of reserving some songs off the album for separate singles, this re-issue is just to include these singles and b-sides on the full release. (Especially "Cruiser's Creek.") However, they screw things up, tossing some of the songs into the middle and the rest at the end, thus mucking up the meat and pittering out fatty in its finish. (Until, boom! "Creek" and crispy mantle!) They should have preserved the original album order and tacked the "extras" at the end in a certain order, providing better sense in the overall flux of it. Shoulda tacked it such: ("To NK... Yarbles") > "Couldn't Get Ahead" > "Petty (Thief) Lout" > "Vixen" (a Brian JonesTown Massacre sounder) > "Cruiser's Creek," and just ditched with "Rollin' Dany" totally, leaving it to the b-sides of the singles. (It's a fodder parody in costume better expressed in the flesh and body of "Cruiser's".) I would recommend that you arrange it that way yourself.

If one were to get into The Fall from a fresh start, I would recommend getting "The Wonderful..." first, being one of the primordial Fall albums that seems like they really sat down to work on a complete album sort of piece, and also being a cornerstone in the foundation of The Fall's longevitous future -- an inspiring lady creature with touch, and a solid strings duo with just the wright stuff - exemplified here by this Brix Smith and "Scanley Fall" (Scanlon/Hanley) collaborative. Get that one, let it thrustfully grab you and smack you all over your luscious face, and then get this one, "This Nation's Saving Grace," to delve deeper but still smackingly into the exploratory fields of The Fall.

(Then get "Palace of Swords Reversed" or "Dragnet" (birth of "Scanley"). The deeper seeds of beginning. Men alone; worms of the afterbirth searching the dirt. ("Totale's Turns" if you wanna get all rock wacky with The Fall, Live, in the very scanley beginnings of the thing. But be sure to get an edition that packs the little letter from the good sir Roman Totale XIII, which is short, sweet, and tender succulence. (Most of them should, I think, printed on the insert.)) And, if you want to experience the more contemporary works during the same exploration which justify the long reign/realm of The Fall, check out "Levitate" along with "The Marshall Suite" (last of "Scanley", then w/out "Scanley", but still of the same new form; and you can fit them both on a 90-minute cassette), or "The Unutterable", or "The Real New Fall Album (Formerly 'Country on the Click')" for proper good measures. If you wanna get some middle bits of that s'wich, go "Extricate" (1990) and "Infotainment Scan" (1993) together. )

Methinks this is why I have heard the whopping "50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong" serves a propper saucy dish in the round-up of The Fall's lopping willery. Good note.

Probably one of the best CDs I have listened to in a while, and a good start for newcomers, This Nations Saving Grace has all the clangor and the melodies and the sharp though sometimes unintelligible wit that separates it from lesser records that abound. This is a must!