The CD that you hold in your hand is the product of a left-sided mind

The Fall: Fall Heads Roll

Mark E. Smith is both the eye and the storm. Unchanging over these many years and albums, he is the only constant in The Fall, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. He is The Fall at the molecular level and he is the same as he was thirty years ago, cantankerous, belligerent, oblique, obscure, and frequently indecipherable. What changes is his surroundings – not only the bandmates and the technology available, but the environment that feeds into his voracious creative appetites and whatever it is that is rubbing in the salt in a given year. These things are as ever, and in fact increasingly, not something that we, the listener are let in on. Apart from the Hunter Thompson tribute “Midnight in Aspen”, the closest we get on Fall Heads Roll is the almost linear narrative of “What About Us?” with MES as the voice of an East German immigrant rabbit upset by doctors handing out morphine and somewhere along that sentence I got lost and had to listen to the song again. Perhaps if I were British. Also in place of pictures of all the band members are photos of Rwandan refugees.

However, all that is unimportant because The Fall, with Mark E. Smith at its helm, is a good ship that stays true to its ever-confounding course. There’s more of a cheerful rock sound these days in comparison to the unforgiving and manic post-punk of the early days. At album’s open, Mark E. Smith mumbles his way through the silly-sounding plod of “Ride Away” and while it would be misleading to describe MES as at all mellowed on this album, he does keep to a calmer groove in his vocal style. Musically, the guitars are prominent and hard-hitting throughout with a spine of electronic beat and the occasional random flurry of synthesizer noise. “Blindness” is godlike, a thundering seven minutes of scungy bass-guitar and MES murmuring about war and posters and who knows what else. The cover of The Move’s classic “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” is also great, superpowered psychedelia like only The Fall can sound assured doing. From the quiet grace (no, seriously) of “Early Days of Channel Fuhrer” to the thrashing excitement of “Youwanner” (and the mysteriously not The Fall-sounding at all but still damn good “Trust in Me”) this is a healthy, engaging slice of The Fall.

Hell, it’s The Fall, what do you want? Their albums are the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, an endless roll of tape unspooling across the landscape to encompass the imagination and unique vision of one of history’s greatest miscreants, Mark E. Smith. Fall Heads Roll is just another section of it revealed to us, a damn fine one at that. ‘And we all clasped hands, in N.Y.C.’

81% => ****

~ by jshopa on June 13, 2008.