The new Fall Album
No bother, and thanks for the link.
No bother, and thanks for the link.
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The new Fall Album
I think a thread where someone mistakenly believes that Mark E Smith is being described as "tick(ing) a lot of the sincere singer/songwriter boxes" while "making social comment on the positive and negative aspects arising from Ireland's Celtic Tiger society." really does show a lot of hope for this brave new world of OTF.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Just fell victim to the new board, writing a long post here and then getting distracted by a phone call. Clicked 'reply', and it was off into the ether. Just found out in 'world' why that was a mistake. Pah.
Did you miss much? Well, it's like being asked to repeat a hilarious one-liner that only half the room heard. Something about how Mark E Smith could do with a change of direction, and I'd pay to see him strumming an acoustic guitar on stage singing earnestly about the fate of Celtic tigers. No, it's no good, I just can't re-capture how fucking funny I was being 30 minutes ago. Honest.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I still don't really understand what everyone else is going on about . . .
WOM: The Fall track by track is up at www.thisisnowhere.co.ukComment
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The new Fall Album
Cheers. I've just done a skim read and will go back for a better look in my off-hours. If it's even better than Reformation, I'm looking quite forward to it.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Must say, I thought this album was pretty mediocre really. One thing which he appears to have totally lost for now- word play. His lyrics used to be so dense and cryptic they needed to be decoded. The best thing about The Fall used to be the sense that there was a secret you weren't being let in on. But there doesn't seem the case here, it really does sound like standard grumpy old man ranting to me.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I've listened to "Imperial Wax Solvent" about twenty times in the last few days and it's fucking fantastic. I thought Carcass was overstating when he suggested this could be the best album since the 80s, but I really think it might be. Certainly the best since "Shift-Work", which I always liked better than the overrated "Extricate".
I'm just happy he's writing loads of lyrics again these days (I interviewed him in about 1988 and he said he wasn't writing so many lyrics at the time because "kids listen to music with no lyrics at all, so it seems a bit obsolete", but the truth was he was a fucking wreck at the time - we'd got through five San Miguels with tequila chasers by this point, MES had ducked off to the toilets and come back sniffing three times, and it was still only 11am - so I suspect he was just utterly incapable for a while). At least four lines from the new LP made me laugh out loud, and I don't mind listening to him shouting "I'm a 50 year old man - AND I LIKE IT!" in that extra-terrifying mad-pensioner voice... true, though, as a writer rather than a rock lyricist, he should be at his peak right now, when in fact he'll never top the stuff he was doing at 23, which is kind of sad. If you knock out stuff like "Jawbone And The Air-Rifle" at an age when most people are still in college, it's fair to expect you should be doing something a bit more challenging in your fifties. Still a genuinely great and original lyric writer, but not quite the master he could have been, blah blah.
Some randomly-chosen baffling short-story-type Fall lyrics from the early 80s, to prove the point and make Derek sigh, and make everyone else except the Fall-sceptics say "no one has EVER done anything like this in the history of rock music, and while it's all very funny that he drinks so much now, maybe it's actually quite sad when you think about it":
JAWBONE AND THE AIR-RIFLE
The rabbit killer left his home for the clough
And said goodbye to his infertile spouse,
Carried air rifle and firm stock of wood,
Carried a night-sight telescope light.
A cemetery overlooked clough valley of mud,
And the grave-keeper was out on his rounds.
Yellow-white shirt buried in duffle coat hood,
Keeping edges out with mosaic color stones.
Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is borne
The air rifle lets out a misplaced shot
It smashed a chip off a valued tomb
Grave-keeper tending wreath-roots said:
"Explain, move into the light of the moon!"
"I thought you were rabbit-prey, or a loose sex criminal,"
Rifleman he say. "Y'see, I get no kicks anymore
From wife or children four.
There's been no war for forty years,
And getting drunk fills me with guilt,
So after eight, I prowl the hills -
Eleven o'clock, I'm tired to fuck.
Y'see, I've been laid off work..."
The grave-keeper said
"You're out of luck.
Here is a jawbone caked in muck -
Carries the germ of a curse
Of the Broken Brothers Pentacle Church,
Formed on a Scotch island
To make you a bit of a man!"
Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is warm
The rabbit killer did not eat for a week.
And no way he can look at meat.
No bottle has he anymore:
It could be his mangled teeth.
He sees jawbones on the street
Advertisements become carnivores
And roadworkers turn into jawbones
And he has visions of islands, heavily covered in slime.
The villagers dance round pre-fabs,
And laugh through twisted mouths.
Don't eat - it's disallowed.
Suck on marrowbones and energy from the mainland...
Jawbone and the air rifle
Who would think they would bring harm?
Jawbone and the air rifle
One is cursed and one is gone
IMPRESSION OF J. TEMPERANCE
Hate wide for dog breeder
In the town of Fairport.
A never-seen dog breeder:
This is the tale of his replica.
Name was J. Temperance
Only two did not hate him
(Because peasants fear local indifference)
Pet shop, and the vet Cameron
One night, vet is called out from his overpaid leisure
To Temperance household, delivered, ran out
And phoned his wife in terror
The next bit is hard to relate
(there are no read-outs for this part of the track)
The new born thing hard to describe
Like a rat that's been trapped inside
A warehouse space, near a city tide
Brown sockets, purple eyes
Fed with rubbish from disposal barges
No changeling,
as the birth was witnessed.
Only one person could do this:
"Yes!" said Cameron
And the thing was in the impression of J. Temperance.
WINTER
Entrances uncovered, street signs you never saw.
All entrances delivered,
Courtesy winter.
You got Manny in the library
Working off his hangover, 3:30
You get the spleen at 3:15
But it's 3:13
The mad kid walked left-side, south-side, towards me
He was about 7, his mother was a cleaning lady,
She had a large black dog.
And the mad kid said:
"Gimme the lead gimme the lead gimme the lead!"
I'd just walked past the alcoholics' dry-out house
The lawn was littered with cans of Barbican
There was a feminist's Austin Maxi parked outside
With anti-nicotine, anti-nuclear stickers on the side
Anyway, two weeks before, the mad kid had said to me
"I'll take both of you on, I'll take both of you on"
Then he seemed the young one
He had a parka on,
And a black cardboard Archbishop's hat
With a green-fuzz skull and crossbones
(He'd just got back from the backward kids' party)
Anyway, then he seemed the young one
But now he looked like the victim of a pogrom.
Entrances uncovered, street signs you never saw.
All entrances delivered,
Courtesy winter.
Entrances uncovered, all enquiries too.
All entrances delivered,
Courtesy winter.
On the first floor of the dryout house was a replica dartboard
And the man on the floor went out of the window, over the lawn, and round to the mad kid:
"Please take this medallion,
Please wear this medallion.
It's no sign of authority.
Wear the gold and put it on."
Courtesy winter.
So around the mad kid, man on the first floor said
"I just looked round, I just looked round,
I just looked round, and my youth it was sold."
Two white doves cross the sky
Look like krakens
And sometimes, that little.....
Makes me tremble.
Courtesy winter.
The mad kid had 4 lights, the average is 2.5 lights
The mediocre, that's 2 lights
The sign of genius is three lights
There's one light left, that's the one light
That's the science law, that's the science law
Courtesy winter.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I think one of Mark E Smith's off-the-cuff boasts sums up the history of the Fall more succinctly than anyone else has managed:
"I used to be psychic, but I drank my way out of it."
It's the earlier, visionary stuff that got me into them, but I do love the best of their later, drunken stuff too. It's been a completely different project for the last couple of decades, and it's weird how well it often works. That cliche about Yeats having the outlook of a wise old man in his youth and only becoming an uninhibited teenager in old age seems to apply in a way.
I've not heard the new one yet, though.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Those lyrics Taylor posted make me feel about the Fall more kindlily than usual. A bit like the way I feel about the Baader Meinhof gang - I'm glad there are people out there doing stuff like that, but I really don't want to be anywhere near them while they're doing it and I'm glad as fuck they've got no chance of prevailing.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I just laughed water through my nose at work when Mark E Smith gargled: "My boss, he has the imagination of a gnat!"
I'm a 31 year old man, and I like it. Can't stop playing it, in fact.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I used to find The Fall a bit saccharine until my ears were opened to them by reading Douglas Hofstadter's articles in Metamagical Themas. I realised that I'd been listening only at the very surface.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I'm almost finished my first run-through and I'm seriously digging it.
I'll have to give it a dozen or so more spins this weekend.
Mrs WOM is not going to be happy. Not happy at all, gents.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Mark E Smith on Journalists:
Aren't you meeting him soon, Carcass?Journalists
Most journalists believe everything they read. It sounds cliched but it's the truth. They've got bollocks for brains, and they're lazy. They can't be bothered to verify what's in front of their eyes. They're so distanced from the subjects they're writing about they have to turn to the internet.
And then you turn up for the interview and it's as if you should feel privileged that some Luke or Alex chap is asking you a list of third-rate questions that some other journalist asked you two years ago from the same magazine. It's not always the fault of the person asking the questions - most of the time they're just youngish blokes who can't handle their drink.Comment
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The new Fall Album
He's got a thing about journalists and booze. I got on well with him because a.) I was more interesting in chatting than asking a list of lame questions and not listening to the answers, and b.) I didn't question it when he kept ordering booze, I just drank up. By the end of the interview, we were like old mates.
Two days later that guy from Loaded turned up, read out some dumb questions off a bit of paper, and didn't have a drink. Rest is history.Comment
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The new Fall Album
This is unbelievably good. It's the most physical record of theirs I've heard.
But I've got to stop playing it, because it's beginning to make some kind of narrative sense and that can't be right. '50 Year Old Man' is like listening to an exorcism (albeit one that involves pissing on towels in hotel rooms and the priapsm of a time-poor man).Comment
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The new Fall Album
Highlights from this morning's breakfast listening with my 5 and 2 1/2 year old:
"What's dis called?"
"50 Year Old Man".
Keeps bobbing head and goes back to munching toast.
"What are they saying?"
"I've been duped".
"What's 'duped'?"Comment
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The new Fall Album
EIM: I got on with him really well as well. He said something about "them wankers not cool guys like you John" to me.
It was a basic respect thing. Don't take the piss, do a bit of research, don't do that NME thing of trying to court controversy where there is none. He only got the same amount of respect that I try and show every one that I interview.
With the exception of Trivium and all Metalcore bands.Comment
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The new Fall Album
It's only the same as anyone. If you turn up to an interview and act like a wanker, the interviewee will usually go away shaking their head and thinking "what a wanker". The only difference is that Smith actually tells you so. Better, really.Comment
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The new Fall Album
I'll have to get this then, by the look of it.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Smith didn't give me a chance. He looked me up and down, thought 'goth', and I got || that much shrift. Then he found out I was Welsh and asked me if I'd heard of a writer called Arthur Machen. I hadn't. Game over. (It didn't help that it was just gone 11.00am and he was already drunk.)
Anyway, Seminar to Discuss the Aesthetics and Politics of The FallComment
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The new Fall Album
Mark Fisher/k-punk, who's presenting at that seminar, wrote a really good three-part essay on The Fall still which is stll up on his blog.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Good stuff, and he's already used "quotidian" and "palimpsest" in the first part. My bingo card's filling up nicely.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Haha, a palimpsest would be easier to read than the white-on-black format he's got on that blog. I have to copy and paste the text into a word document so I don't feel like I'm crawling through a post-structuralist's intestines.Comment
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The new Fall Album
Well I've gone and bought this now, so it best be good. First one I've bought since Live At The Witch Trials...Comment
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The new Fall Album
Bloody hell, Talksport just played a bit of The Fall, and Frank Skinner is talking about them as we speak!Comment
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