Records: After the Fall... come the reissues

By David Auerbach

Mark E. Smith, vocalist and leader of the Fall, may not have orange hair or odd piercings, and he doesn't wear leather that regularly, but for sheer, defiant energy and the obsession with constant innovation, he is unmatched by anyone. For 20 years now, under dozens of lineups, Smith has ranted atonally against everyone and everything, as his music has shifted and evolved into territories unknown. Fall's 19th studio album, Levitate, is no less a lovable racket, served up in a jungle-and-dance cocktail.

"The house is falling in!" hollers Smith at the start of the staggering "4 1/2 Inch", and yes it is, as all manner of filthy, mud-encrusted guitar samples collapse on top of each other with at least four vocal tracks of Mark flying around the channels, jabbering incomprehensibly at one another. Screaming white-noise guitars smother him, then the drum track falls apart, and everything starts again. With mainstay guitarists Brix Smith and Craig Scanlon gone for good, keyboardist Julia Nagle shapes most of the tracks into short but perverse drones. Smith gives his strangest vocals in years, paring down lyrics, filtering his voice, and sounding prophetic-
ally drunk.

Choice tracks include the cover "I'm a Mummy" ("I'm a mummy / I scare people / Look what happens when I walk up to somebody"), "Ol' Gang," based around a single piano note, and the rumbling "Quartet of Doc Shanley." What may seem like unlistenable noise mysteriously coheres through the godlike genius of Mark Smith, producing a strangely melancholic and slightly inconsistent (something ugly happened to "Tragic Days") album that, as always, shows him ten unpopular years ahead of anyone else.

Among inferior, unauthorized Fall albums (five this year alone) come two essential reissues. Live at the Witch Trials was the Fall's first studio album from 1979. Smith doesn't quite have the declamatory power that would later possess him, but he knows what he's doing. This semi-punk stew of surprisingly proficient music includes two classics: the amphetamine-paranoia fantasy "Frightened" and the eight-minute "Music Scene," containing a classic moment when the engineer yells about how long the band's been going at it, to absolutely no effect.

The 90-minute live-in-New-Zealand Fall In a Hole, from 1983, features primitive, bashing performances of the Fall's most "difficult" material from Hex Enduction Hour and Room to Live--lots of one-chord screeds--but most significantly includes a song that never popped up elsewhere, the ten-minute "Backdrop": Smith yells like a man possessed over a busy, stuttering rhythm as deafening amounts of singularly unique guitar and keyboard noise build up around him, crashing down every few minutes. More compelling than anything on Room to Live, it's one of the best things Smith and co. have ever done. The rest of the album is solid performances of classics like "The Man Whose Head Expanded" and "Fantastic Life" from the Fall's earliest enduring line-up. Be warned, however, that both reissues seem to have been mastered directly from vinyl and, while of decent sound quality, contain a few blemishes and skips. But it's a small price to pay for the long unavailable works of, after all, one of the two real poets rock has ever known.

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