Hailing from Prestwich, the long-time post-punk underdogs The Fall return with New Facts Emerge.
With New Facts aside, does the band bring anything fresh to a style they’ve held since the dawn of punk itself?
By no stretch of the imagination are The Fall a new band. Having gone through multiple line-up changes since their 1979 inception, mainly due to lead singer (and only constant member) Mark E. Smith being your archetypal ‘hell to work with genius’ frontman. To date, the band has released 16 studio albums, but including many random releases from the band over the years, much to Smith’s chagrin, the number is much, much higher. Forty years on however and with more member changes than a modern reality show, how does the acerbic post-punk band hold up?
The album opens up into a fill, or a Segue if you will, into Fol De Rol, and at six and a half minutes it’s not breaking us in early. Having once been described by critic Simon Reynolds as “a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny, voiced through a unique, one-note delivery somewhere between amphetamine-spiked rant and alcohol-addled yarn.” With a song like this, it’s easy to see why. The drum and bassline is tense and almost a little uneasy and the guitar and vocals growl alongside each other. Nevertheless, it feels interesting at the least. The same can be said of another mammoth track on the album, the nearly nine-minute Couples Vs Jobless Mid-30’s. However, in the case of the latter, the uneasiness and strange distorted, angry vocals do little to carry attention through to where the song actually picks up, around the sixth minute.
New Facts Emerge is The Fall’s 32nd release.
Despite being categorised under the smaller genre of post-punk, Brillo De Facto, with its less monotonous drums and guitars strummed high on the neck feels like an attempt at more traditional punk. The vocals remain abrasive and the lyrics cryptic but it’s less demanding than Fol De Rol and Couples Vs Jobless Mid-30’s.
The title track New Facts Emerge feels almost Brechtian in its approach. The song gallops on repetitively for its four-minute running time with only the lyrics there to break the instrumental monotony. It’s not capable of holding your attention without some effort from the listener but those who cut through the samey guitar and bass to listen to the warped lyrics of Smith will be rewarded. This reviewer recommends sitting in a less comfortable chair so you’re pushed to pay attention to it.
As the album wears on however, the unique approach that The Fall are so known for, starts to grate this time around. In the case of Gibbus Gibson and Second House Now, the repetitive and demanding beats and melodies are really starting to take their toll. It could possibly be a symptom of not being in the EXACT frame of mind to listen to lyrically challenging post-punk, it could be the songs genuinely aren’t that good, either way, it feels like the album is starting to come a little loose. With the addition of Groundsboy, the penultimate track falling into an almost country-western vibe, there’s every argument to be made for the latter.
In the final, massive track of the album Nine Out Of Ten, we’re taken from that almost western style of guitar into a minimalist guitar and vocals set of drunken-sounding vocals that wouldn’t be amiss on a well-seasoned pub band singer, near closing time. However, five long, long minutes in you start to realise it’s just the guitar, the rest of the band have stopped, the singer has passed out into his pint and its one guitarist left blasting away as the crowd question if he’s had something stronger than the lager. Nine of of ten? I’m afraid not gents, last orders are out.
Author: Steve, Southgate Store
