ILX Artist Ballot no #33 : Fron Witch Trials to Ersatz it's THE FALL (Albums, Tracks, heck why not Members also?)

their version of "My New House" was blistering.

"We don't beg. We just take." Yeah, love Putta Block.

Unfortunately Palace of Swords Reversed doesn't appear to be on Spotify so the link below is missing the last section that is a tape edit going from them starting up what sounds like the drum beat from 'Rowche Rumble' and MES talking about how much money they raised playing for a "charity of spastics" to another tape edit where I pulled my username: "Hail, new puritan, Righteous maelstrom. Have you ever heard a Bill Haley LP?" And then they go straight into 'Cary Grant's Wedding' with the word: "Everybody...!" and the song ends.

http://open.spotify.com/track/0SG2QfMNJrArA60s29asop

Putta Block is the bomb, but Elastic Man is like my sixth favorite song of all time

Sent my ballot last night and already regretting all the stuff I had to leave off, like Psychomafia, the above-mentioned Cary Grant's Wedding, Marquis Cha Cha, Look Know, Fantastic Life, Middlemass; not to mention Martin Bramah and Una Baines in greatest Fall members.

I wish I couldve vited for Yvonne Pawlett. Playing keyboards on Rowche Rumble = coolest person alive

...she's still alive right?

Yvonne Pawlett is an art therapist who helps people to recover from mental health problems and overcome learning difficulties through visual arts and crafts.

Nice!

Any rules on versions? Is a vote for a song a vote for the song, regardless of the fact that one might love a Peel session version but hate the official version?

In summary: Votes are for the 'song', and specific versions will be given an addendum where necessary, sort of like this:

60. TWO STATES (1995) [115 points, 6 votes, 1 Number1, Specific versions:2="Slanted and Enchanted"

Doh. Sorry.

my first shortlist is 35 songs, this is gonna be hard.

"Pay Your Rates" (from Grotesque, 1980) - This one also has a one-chord (F# major) rockabilly groove on the verses and a tempo change for the chorus. As with 'Elastic Man', the chords in the chorus are all major and not harmonically related. This time, they're even more dissonant, moving from E major to A# major and G# major. One of the guitars (the one in the right channel) takes particular liberties with this progression and sometimes plays notes from the F# major chord! There is also an overdubbed guitar picking at dissonant string sounds from behind the bridge. (The version of this song played by a different lineup of the group on the Seminal Live album nine years later is quite different.)

Her mother from the circus
Put her on Junior Show Time
Her father was much worse
Can't put why in this line

I always loved this song and found it an intruiging lyric, even more intruiging now. Can't even remember what I thought it was at the time.

Now this is a POLL. This is the one group/ artist which is hardest for me to work out a consensus on. Is that some special quality The Fall have or would that be the same for any persons favorite group?

i think this is definitely a thing with the fall. aside from many regarding hex album of choice i have no idea how anything else would place in this poll. i'm particularly interested in how the tracks rollout.

*as the* album of choice

steely dan seem to be another such band. the album poll for them here showed remarkably close voting across all their original albums.

Split voting for "Shoulder Pads 1" vs. "Shoulder Pads 2" or can we just vote for "Shoulder Pads?"

it's all one song really. like winter.

This one's a little complicated! Just trying to explain what the bass does:

"Middle Mass" (from Slates, 1981) - Harmonically unrelated major chords yet again here with a progression of G# to E. The bass part is particularly interesting as it includes three-note chromatic lines that anticipate the coming chord. When the underlying chord is E, bassist Steven Hanley plays a run of C-C#-D and then lands on the G#. This almost spells out the first, third, fourth and fifth of that G# major chord (C being the enharmonic equivalent of B#, the third of the chord), outlining the triad, but Hanley chooses to play D instead of D#. He does this perhaps because, as a minor seventh, D is more consonant to the still underlying E major chord than D# would be; in any case, there is still dissonance in the tritone interval when D descends to G#.

When the underlying chord is G#, Hanley plays the same three-note chromatic anticipation, this time of the impending E chord, with the notes G#-A-A#, landing on E when the chord changes. As with the other phrase, this comes close to spelling out the E major triad, but includes the flattened fifth (A#, or Bb, instead of B). Same issue here of perhaps a greater consonance with the underlying chord, but a dissonance in the tritone descent from A# to E.

A contrasting section begins with a phrase modulation to a quite remote key, with a chord progression of C major to D major.

Forgot to include - there's a two-note keyboard line of B-F# that runs over the E and the G# chords. It's somewhat dissonant; they're consonant pitches except for the B over the G# chord, but they don't spell anything out with regard to the chordal tones.

There's a character in Dickens - Our Mutual Friend? - who has taught himself to read solely by reading Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I don't remember how much of this is worked over in the book, but that kind of hard coding of a single work into the fabric of linguistic perception and expression is a decent description of how i feel about The Fall. I'm not trying to claim any elect authority of insight, just saying that they were pretty much the accompaniment and sacred book of the expansion of my horizons in my teenage years. Out of them came everything. Even now, when they play a much less important part in my cultural life, I still listen to them far more than any other single group.

Going to my wildly inaccurate last fm stats I see the following for the last month:

The Fall 151
The Impressions 73
Culture 50
Silver Jews 48
Haim 43
Gunplay 23

I didn't even think I'd been listening to them that much! And looking at that I'd say at least three of those entries aside from The Fall I'm listening to because of The Fall (Culture, Haim, Gunplay fwiw). (Of course Silver Jews could hardly be disassociated from that as well, there's just not a personal Fall link - more like a peel/words thing going on).

All this means two things for this poll, help and hindrance.
Hindrance: better/worse is more or less an entirely meaningless concept for me, for the vast majority of their output. It just is. And by vast majority I mean everything apart from Fall Heads Roll, Post TLC: Reformation!, and Imperial Wax Solvent, all of which I think problematic for various reasons. The return of the fulfilment of that mysterious quality of 'Fallness' with Your Future Our Clutter and Ersatz GB is very pleasing, but feels precarious. This makes me a shit critic.
Help: I really don't have to worry about choosing favourites. Meaningless as I say, so I'll be trying to pick songs according to criteria other than better/worse, hopefully a bit non-canonical, trying to discover structures, waymarks, guiding lights - uncover street signs and entrances as it were.

I know nothing about chords.

fuck you and your 'cultural life', fizzles, imaginative life.

fuck, i seem to have lost my glasses, and my flat really needs tidying up, then I've got to go to my mum's. this is also all the fall's fault. still - first choice (and these aren't in final polling order - I'll do that later - and the choice of subject is more or less random as well):

The Aphid

So, a quick one this, covering the category Fall Dances. These are those versions of songs like The Twist, where the dance moves are described in the song. So, in Dead Beat Descendant, you've got the whole act like you've just got out of jail/and you've got a man on your trail/Come back here! Come back here! stuff. Instead of doing the hitch-hike or w/e you are instructed to dance like you're descended from a vicious criminal. These also impose comic or dance-like mechanisms on the world/daily behaviour. Dance as formal interpretative mechanism of human behaviour to put it theoretically, but it's just kind of feeding on the old satiric thing of removing spiritual agency from people, making them look comic because they are not in control of their physical movements, which are dictated by the bizarre details of fate or the world. That's a world view you can see throughout The Fall of course, but the specific dance side of things feeds in a lot of songs as well - the insane/impossible choreography of Oswald Defence Lawyer for instance, or the melancholy Faustian descent of Sinister Waltz.

Here the instructions around about how to catch an aphid are turned into a dance called The Aphid.

It isn't necessarily hugely musically distinguished in one way, but they do this sort of punky pep so fucking well. It's fucking catchy basically. How they conserve and maintain that catchy and tense momentum in their songs is a mystery to me, cos I'm no musician, but even apparently simple songs, like The Aphid manage it. So there's a kind of Part 1 (this is where I need tim!) of propulsive descent Part 2, treading water, holding the momentum up, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 tense pull up of energy, drums scratching guitar, Part 1, Part 2, and that's The Aphid. And of course Smith's great at just catching those shifts in momentum with his voice, hence the reason I can have 'The Aphid!' as a catchphrase from the song, cos there's a couple of times where it rly kicks, acting as punctuation to the more prosaic delivery of the instructions. On Cerebral Caustic this sound is almost generic (you don't really hear it again until Wolf Kidult Man), but on this specific song the scratching, patting and sawing feels appropriate. Smith's voice is crisp and clipped, as is appropriate for this instructive song. Smith as unbending dance master here.

Also, #insects! Have kind of always felt the whole insects/spiders and The Fall thing is tapped into the junky's/alcoholic's tremens mainly from Burroughs. (But by god there's that terrifying reptilian scene in Le cercle rouge). Smith's notoriously fascinated by the detail of belief systems as well, and as well as that junky thing, there's the whole 'insects as spiritually alien representations of death and regeneration'. They're definitely sinister in The Fall and flit around the corners of the mind in a v unappetising way (bug day's the locus classicus for this isn't it? - you've got the giant moths in Neighbourhood of Infinity and the screwed up tattoo'd butterflies in The NWRA), but they're also a bit incongruous, not part of the spastic human dance. In this, you're just left wondering what sort of fucking creature requires such a complex set of apparatus and instructions to catch!

Catchphrases and hook lines (I'll try and do these for each song, cos in a fairly reductive way, you can kind of get a sense of how good a song is by the number of musical and lyrical things that just f'ing get stuck in your head, even though you have no idea what they mean, other than the fact that they really seem to mean something that is v pertinent to the world, and you find blurting them out while wandering about)
And who can ever forget this one?
The Aphid!
Retrieve..... chill frame.
And that's the Aphid.

Also regretting leaving off CnC Hassleschmuck, possibly MES's most hilarious rant.

You wouldn't even know the sun was up
Unless there was a press release on it
Oh dear friends
I can't continue this
Arthur Askey's just been shot
Maybe we should do a tribute
And we'll do "You Got to Hassle Schmuck"
Will you let me play
If I patronise you today

There might be a connection between The Aphid and the beginning of Scanner Darkly

great posts, fizzles. this part:

they were pretty much the accompaniment and sacred book of the expansion of my horizons in my teenage years.

very closely mirrors my personal experience, except that I was 18 when I really got into them (the year This Nation's Saving Grace came out). my high school (ex) girlfriend turned me on to Wonderful and Frightening World that summer, and I quickly started exploring the back catalogue - this was around the time that Line Records did those nice white vinyl reissues of Hex and RTL.

lol @ me writing "catalogue" like a Britisher, this poll is already rubbing off on me.

thanks sleeve - yeah, don't feel it's unique. feels like there's something total and compelling about The Fall - perhaps especially if you haven't been following from 70s - that leads to a sort of metanoia.

I have no interest in any "greatest band ever" conversation (any more) and no wish to convert. quite the opposite in fact. but I think that's where those fairly common fall fan compulsions come from.

forget the start of ASD, DAM - what's the link?

first chapter devoted to the drug casualty who hallucinates (?) that he is covered with aphids that are constantly biting him, and how he kept putting them in jars

the Scanner Darkly connection occurred to me as well

having less than 30 spots is KILLING me, arrgh.

TS: "Bury" vs. "Smile", answer = IMPOSSIBLE

hahah missed this in the OP"

None of this "Can't choose" nonsense, man up yeah?

If you'll allow an interloper who's only tried once to "get into" the Fall, that "Job Search" track is awesome.

Unfortunately the amazing resource of Fall Youtube (all their albums and peel sessions at least) curated by user 'fallfanuk' has been taken down recently

good to see snow on easter sunday obv.

finding it hard to get into this tbh - tend to go through an elliptical orbit of listening these days, and have passed a perihelion. just listening to a load of skip spence right now, which isn't rly conducive. however, had numbers radio station stuff in the background all afternoon, which reminded me of the genius of

Haf Found Bormann

HAS to be the Janice Long session version, which is nuts. scree of scrambled electronics, Brix vox, delivering co-ordinates and crazed report of discovery in monotone punctuated with her screaming HAF FOUND BORMANN, becomes increasingly incoherent and desperate as reaches its conclusion.

Nazis, numbers codes (Smith's obsession with strings of numbers & code/identity), slabs of noise and electrics, interference, disruption &c. part of the hey luciani papal/nazi conspiracy package. top 30 stuff 4reel frenz!

G3: Gong I.S. (R5) (2 samples) ** ACHTUNG! 03246/16 38146/14 75153/26 (R x5) * ACHTUNG! 03246/16 03246/16 (16 x 5F pairs) = 67972 ....

TRANSMISSION END. TRANSMISSION END.

Is the Janice Long version on CD yet or does that have to wait for the perhaps never-to-occur next Beggars Deluxe Ed.?

not on cd as far as i know, Jon.

boo...

Impression of J Temperance

not sure this rly needs any description cos it's near the dead centre of Fall horror canon. A possible narrative - there was a slightly weird fracture near the start of the 20th C. the tentacle from MR James' Count Magnus and Machen's Novel of the Black Seal made its way across the atlantic and proliferated under HP Lovecraft, then later in horror film, comics and rock n roll. it was the vivid horror side of the. in the uk, as far as I can tell, the ghost story stayed the ghost story, more psychological, it didn't really seem to become, from my limited knowledge, all that embodied in tangible horror. most of the stuff i've read seems to have kept its Victorian impedimenta - the upper class, stately home side, as that was the only place ghosts could exist. some of its very good (like Elizabeth Jane Howard/Robert Aickman early ghost stories in We Are For the Dark). those super-generalised narratives always make me feel slightly uneasy - there's got to be loads of exceptions, and i'd love to know about them. Nigel Kneale feels important.

But The Fall took the American, comic-book side and replugged it into a Victorian landscape. Not the Victorian landscape as it was, preserved in literary aspic but the decaying Victorian northern industrial landscape of Manchester and Salford - docks, canals, derelict houses - as well as the content of the song the covers feel important here, like City Hobgoblins.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ymWj-QmtyTQ/SP-ArxtBfWI/AAAAAAAABBM/VTB-yru2he8/s400/hobgoblinsbig.jpg

that transformation of popular American horror back into specifically English working class landscapes feels like a unique achievement, literary or musical, to me. again, that's probably not the case - Fogwalking by Pete Hammill, set in a futuristic decaying London feels both non-melodramatic and legit scary, mind you, that's the same year as this, so hardly a precedent. How does James Herbert stack up on the lit side? (Only read Rats). Old Play for Todays?

difficult to describe the menace in this song. that rhythm section is so dank and sparse. not so much here, where it feels militaristic and creeping, but often the rockabilly 'death dance' beat taps primitive rock n roll and spiritual trance - obv Can big influence on Smith here. there's trademark sounds, like the needling guitar, that scrapes and slides at the beginning, and mockingly echoes Smith on lines like 'only two did not hate him' and 'in the town of the ports', plus Smith's seagull screech on the 'hideous replica' part.

love typical commentary on own song - 'there are no read outs for this part of the track'. despite feeling this is both literary and musical, there's always a strong sense of the found object in early Fall (all that stuff on the back of the Fiery Jack single, with this being the only recording of an experiment in the Welsh hills etc). And Smith's voice and commentary is everywhere. The auditory margins of Fall songs are as crowded as the visual margins of late medieval MSS, teeming with voices and characters. Sometimes they are muttered or inaudible, sometimes forthright. There are sarcastic asides, snarls of fiendish satire, inarticulate expressions of sets of emotions, rather than the usual television set of commonplaces. the psychic infra and ultra emotions you might find in a JG Ballard story, revealed by dripping the sour lime of Smith’s voice/corruscating etching fluid. In fact to take a phrase of Ballard’s that seems especially descriptive, Fall songs are ‘a claustrophobic focus of suppressed aggressions’. All this forms a sort of musical knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into the half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fears of man, peering into the darkened forest that surrounds the rational spaces of the mind.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kx45zc4Lh21qabj6to1_250.jpg

also great example of his ability for coining the new proverbial - 'cos peasants fear local indifference', 'overpaid leisure'.

album version needs more Smith telephone impressions that you get on the live versions.

love the grand terror of little England. god, his lyrics are so stripped down and vivid. 'knorpel' is the word - gristle, strange, not afraid of ugliness. plus narrative! minimally linked, confused because seen mainly in darkness - that darkness between objects, or scenes, or understanding a key feature of The Fall generally. love the fact it is the replica that is telling the story. ('Never seen dog breeder'). This has got to be top 5 or something hasn't it?

memorable bits - whole song? but particular favourite bits not already mentioned:
'only two did not hate him'
''Yes!' said Cameron, 'And the thing was in the Impression of J Temperance'

Awesome witchhammer of a post, Fizzles. If you don't mind doxxing yourself a bit, may I ask if you write about this stuff somewhere and if so, where?

J Temperance doubtless in my ballot when I get to filling it out. I feel like I prefer the Fall in a Hole vers but I will have to do a new a/b on it.

knorpelgroteske, the 17th century Germanic artform where ornamental foliage intertwines and melts into the half-seen faces of animals, monstrously distorted or assimilated into the vegetative surroundings, so that the viewer can never be quite sure what exactly is being portrayed, other than getting an impression of the primal fears of man, peering into the darkened forest that surrounds the rational spaces of the mind.

You have also made me think of Grillen, the grotesque little things drawn into the margins of manuscripts beloved of the first-wave german Romantics.

I recall being excessively proud of a dn of mine a few years ago: "Yes," said Cam'ron, "and the thing was in the impression of J Timberlake"

ha! I think I remember laughing at that dn.

i don't really write about this stuff really. did have a (non-fall) blog but have mothballed it - not v good at that sort of thing tbh (not fishing btw, i just get all irritated w my tone and end up in spiral of self-irritation, + lack of time). don't hang round fall forums generally, prefer ilx.

wd like to see the Grillen (gis amusing but pointless). Grotesque clearly the crucial element of early/mid Fall - horrific but also comic, the dark/light of Dragnet as well as Grotesque. It's one of the big other things they achieve I think - that fusion of horror and satire. Not that they're exactly incommensurate, but humour plus horror is hard. Grotesque does the satiric thing of revealing the inner in a transformed outer - 'a spotty exterior hides a spotty interior', but also repellent and frightening. Guess Perverted by Language vid good for this? Leave the Capitol as well - a line like 'when the maids smile in unison' is both alarming and indicative of London as place of automatic non-politeness. He does this thing so well.

Probably could have specified the In A Hole version, it's magnificent.

It's Monday, post vids of Fall tunes why not?

Big New Prinz

Cruiser's Creek

Container Drivers

darkness between objects, or scenes, or understanding a key feature of The Fall generally

Fizzles killing it itt. This goes right back to the metanoia, right? The Halifax copter of "Words of Expectation" flying over "My New House." Come for the beat, stay for the hermetic study.

gotta love Tony Wilson in that Big New Prinz clip. "What can you say about the Fall, as in barbed wire..."

Fizzles u have seen this thread yeah?

"Hotel Bloedel" by the Fall

ah, yeah, was gamaliel ratsey back then.

Come for the beat, stay for the hermetic study.

yeah, this, absolutely. though I also feel slightly uncomfortable at getting too mystical about it all. it's hard not to - partly because they're so encyclopedic that they're effectively an i ching for late 20th C alienation. hermeticism from sheer populousness, apophenia from an accumulation of hogarthian detail - something like Hex is so dense (and Hogarth's a rly good Fall analogue). feel like i need to resist it a bit though as well - resist the metanoia - because it can minimise the physical attributes. just what smith and co are doing - his/their agency in producing the physical attributes of the songs. the depiction of highly specific time and place - 'I took a walk down W11, I had to wade through 500 European punks' sort of thing (overemphasising the horror a bit at the expense of that side of things - Smith as powerful portrayer of modern world), plus that super-dense accumulation of powerful minimal elements - whether words or sound.

love that Big New Prinz - barbed wire fence is a ref to T Wilson's hand-gliding incident on Granada isn't it?

Well, for some reason I thought it was MES' own intro to The Fall on Totales Turns, but I played it recently and it's not there..

(In a Hole maybe?)

Just saw this thread. This is tough. Don't forget to vote for 'I'm Into C.B.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnunhozizjM