Fall

1979 is one of the most fertile years for rock music. We're in the thick of new wave, and the bands of the period seem to be competing to hand the alternative audience the definitive album, steeped in the moods and spirit of the times as well as musically groundbreaking. "Y", "Half Machine Lips Move", "154", "Entertainment" and "Unknown Pleasures" are just a few of the works that saw the light of day in that span of time, and which undoubtedly redefined the sound of rock, helping to ferry it into the realms of experimentation. Punk, devolved blues, funk, Velvet-esque noise, kraut-derived electronics, and Beefheart of course, are the sources feeding the (still quite varied) sound of new wave, an audible testimony to a real-world imagination dehumanized by industrialization, where the city outskirts become the capital of alienation and grim, Blade Runner-like imagery. It's no surprise, then, that the sounds of the era are rich in synthetic patterns, with experimentation favoring rhythm over melodic exploration, in a semiotic quest for a sound that could bear witness to that restless vision.

In the industrialized, grey Manchester of Buzzcocks and Joy Division, the formidable genius of Mark E. Smith found room to emerge — an abrasive, unresolved character if ever there was one, yet capable of forging an original sound, an ideal bridge between punk's raw ferocity and experimentation with song form. Noise, melody and lurching rhythms serve as the backdrop to Smith's caustic soliloquies, his "talking" style landing somewhere between a feral Lou Reed and a redeemed Captain Beefheart.

The songs of The Fall act as a sounding board for the moods of England's industrial outskirts, where the days pass unshakeably identical to one another, between factory work and the classic pint at the pub with friends (topped off with the odd brawl) — and so they can only sound monotonous, heavy and bleak, in the name of a modern tribalism that is nothing more than the ritual celebration of that tedious way of life; Smith's disjointed litanies channel outward the repressed anger of the average worker, but they also expose the degradation of the slums, the other face of the English industrial city, amid tales of prostitutes, drunks and tramps.

From a strictly musical standpoint, then, Smith is a dissolute bard who elevated tedium to an existential paradigm, repetition to a musical dogma. The Fall's art is one of deconstruction and assemblage, as with many bands of that period. By vampirizing the best of avant-rock artists (Velvet Underground) and blues-primitivists (Beefheart, Cramps), and grafting it all onto the skeleton of punk, Smith arrived at a highly creative formula for the rock song.

While not as innovative as Throbbing Gristle or Pere Ubu, as ferocious as The Pop Group, or as extreme as no wave, The Fall could nonetheless boast an enviable pop sensibility that, grafted onto new wave sounds, allowed them to push the genre's conventions forward and go on to influence a whole generation of indie musicians.

Like "Live At Witch Trials" before it, "Dragnet" is the triumph of human psychosis set to music, unfolding across eleven misshapen gems, dark and alluring precisely because they slip away just when you think you've fully absorbed them (a result of the sheer density of quotations and references they contain). The Fall sound atonal because, on first listen, every sonic element seems to go its own way, like Smith's Lou Reed-style "talking", jarringly caged within relentless rhythmic structures, or the guitars, which churn out sequences of riffs repeated ad nauseam, inducing a sense of tedium. It's precisely this obsessive repetition that's the defining trait of the Fall's sound (alongside the singer's ranting, of course): a frantic repetition that never lets the songs unfurl into fully realised melodic lines, only into hints of pop structures that barely surface amid the harmonic wreckage and Smith's disjointed sermonising.

"Psychic Dance All" is something of the cornerstone of the whole record, unwinding through nerve-shredding rhythmic "stop and go" and guitar dances that weave an atonal carpet beneath Mark E. Smith's disgusted delivery. "A Figure Walks" is pure tribalism for the industrial age: an Indian dance with the bass out front dictating the rhythm and the guitars trailing behind, half-heartedly sketching out almost raga-rock figures. "Printhead" shows Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley updated for the new wave era, in a lopsided rock'n'roll romp where, as usual, the vocal sits out of focus against the flow of the rhythm. "Before The Moon Falls" is the darkest piece on the record, with a menacing bass underpinning Smith's monotone rant, this time somewhere between Lou Reed and Ian Curtis.

The Fall's relentless boogies are the quintessence of rock'n'roll, and they tie back into it through a kind of time-warp that gathers up the experimental drive of twenty years of popular music; the Fall are the essence of postmodernism in rock, not unlike Wire. You can hear it in the terrifying "Spectre Vs Rector", an industrial jumble of disjointed sounds, like Red Crayola harnessed within the Velvet Underground's white noise, where the obsessive rhythm and screeching guitars paint a delirious sonic fresco, the perfect soundtrack for a Nazi concentration camp. Of absolute artistic worth is "Muzorewis's Daughter", dominated by noise-laden progressions in the vein of post-"Venus In Furs", paving the way for furious Cramps-style romps, in a circular interplay of shifting rhythms, simmering tension and unleashed rage.

Never has the Fall's sound felt as current as in this era of new wave revival, but to say so would be an insult to the artistic "purity" of Smith, who for over two decades, starting with "Live At Witch Trials" and "Dragnet", kept on relentlessly gifting us masterpieces, indifferent to fashions and prevailing trends. May this man stay forever young, and may this sound keep on multiplying.

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29/10/2006