best Fall album for starters

Also anyone who might want to have long conversations about The Fall's discography up through Extricate is especially welcome to send me emails and/or chat with me. Thank you.

hey Bimble, you out there? What do you think of Dragnet?

I love Dragnet! Yes I'm here. Too bad we can't chat. You need AIM!

yes...and no...

yes I need AIM but no bcz I fear it...

Dude then like, I dunno...write me an email. Do it right now. Thanks.

email? how? how, I say?

the email thru yr blog?

yeah, or through ILX. You should know. You sent me one the other day and I responded.

oh. did you respond...i never found it. how do i find it?

Look in your spam folder? I'm newdawnfades.

also you keep writing me from that robot address which I don't understand either. I don't think you got the last email I sent back to that address, either!

yes bcz i sent an email fom the link in one of yr posts, from now on i will just send it from my email address...

also ignore the captchas comment

Arright. :)

email sent. sry bout that.

I'm listening to Detective Instinct, now, though and I don't hear anyone going "FFfs" in the background. So I'm not sure what you were talking about. Can you describe the sound better?

― Hot Pants Floyd (Bimble Is Still More Goth Than You), Thursday, 16 October 2008 02:57 (3 days ago)

Listen carefully! Or (horror) maybe they've been remastered out! Christ. No, anyway, it's someone in the background going 'ff ff'. I had to have it pointed out to me.

On a connected but more general not, those little sounds and mutterings and strange background washes are often what make Fall songs so good, among all the other things.

And whoever said there are great sonic riches to be had after Extricate is quite Korrekt - I was getting a great deal of enjoyment from the opening 30 seconds of Two Face for example - however, in terms of albums, high-water marks are Levitate, The Unutterable, Are You Are Missing Winner (nay stare not so) and The Real New Fall LP. But of course all of them are necessary really.

I think Scanlon in some ways was more of a loss than Hanley, although both tower above the earth like musical colossussesses-ah.

Von Sudenfed immensely enjoyable. And their gig last year was one of the best I've seen.

How I envy anyone just getting into the Fall for the first time.

First discovered the band in early 87 after buying a copy of It's the new thing 7" from a great record shop in Colne purely on the basis of the cover. Couldn't believe what I was hearing. Went out immediately and bought Bend Sinister which is still one of my all time favourites and ordered copies of Witch Trials and Dragnet along with the German Line records white vinyl copies of Hex Enduction Hour and Room To Live. The whole concept of music just twisted 90 degrees in my head and it's never gone back to how it had been before...Total joy!

Aw sod it...just get the blummin lot of them...they are worth having, even mid 90's stuff and some of the post Scanlan/Hanley, pre, new-millenial-renaissance stuff have tracks of breathtaking scope and imagination.

I'm sorta getting into The Fall! The three albums I have are The Light User Syndrome (awesome, awesome), The Marshall Suite (pretty good) and Perverted By Language (very cool stuff) and some Fontana years compilation I haven't listened to yet. I will expand my collection at some stage.

Ned Raggett is an anagram for "Get Dragnet" -- his recommendation?

ned?

I'd start with Slates. It's short and sweet, and one of the best things they ever put out. Quite representative, and real variety. There's their angular pop side with Leave the Capitol, the creeping menace of An Older Lover, the 2-chord vamp/rant of Slates, Slags etc, and a glorious blast of punk noise in Pink Press Threat.

> "Personal starting point for me was Palace of Swords Reversed. FUCKING GENIUS."
> Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 17 October 2002 19:18 (7 years ago) Bookmark

I think I was pretty much happy with Slates and This Nation's for a long time. Been listening to Dragnet, Perveted by Language, Hex Education, The Wonderful and Frightening World..., Grotesque over the last week and loving it all, mostly. Re-listening to Slates and that is just one of the best records ever, on a track-by-track basis with no hint of a drop-off but its weird to think of The Fall as just a band that releases records rather than a world that was mapped out by MES, Brix and these scruffy looking people from a part of Manchester. I wouldn't want to listen to Slates in isolation anymore.

I'll look at the Unutterable sometime.

IMO everything they did in the studio from 79-89 is worth your time. After that it's hit or miss, I know there are plenty of people who will rep for individual albums after that but I find the 90s almost completely covered by "A Past Gone Mad" and "A World Bewitched" compilations. Even the esteemed "The Unutterable" is let down by a string of tracks towards the end. I much prefer my 00s playlist, all killer no filler. But then again, no two Fall fans will agree what tracks fall into which category.

Is your playlist public, Gerald?

The run from Dragnet to Bend Sinister made them my favourite band growing up, but there was a really swift drop in quality after that. Smith suddenly seemed to lose intensity and lyrical focus from The Frenz Experiment onwards, with Seminal Live being a particular nadir - the live songs on it weren't seminal, and the few semi-demi-seminal songs weren't live.

Yes, Stewart Lee did a really good job in compiling A Past Gone Mad for the 90s output, and individual 00s songs such as the Peel version of 'Blindness' still have the power to surprise. My attention wanders whenever I try to listen to a whole 00s album though. The best songs on the last few albums tended to be the ones where the band locked into a riff and Smith's vocals were almost incidental, such as this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l6FkGXjULQ

+1 would love to see your playlist gerald

> "Personal starting point for me was Palace of Swords Reversed. FUCKING GENIUS."
> Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 17 October 2002 19:18 (7 years ago) Bookmark

― koogs, Wednesday, February 24, 2010 7:40 AM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this^

I'm old, so when I say 'playlist' I mean 'I cherry-picked these tracks and created my own local MP3 compilation'. I edited a few tracks that went on way too long, too. Here's the tracklisting:

Best Of The 21st Century (6 hours long!)

Cyber Insekt / Two Librans / W.B. / Sons Of Temperance / Dr. Bucks' Letter / Way Round / Ketamine Sun (extract) / Hands Up Billy - The Unutterable
Jim's The Fall / Bourgeois Town / My Ex-Classmates Kids / Reprise: Jane - Prof. Mick - Ey Bastardo - Are You Are Missing Winner
Susan Vs Youthclub - single
Green Eyed Loco-Man / Theme From Sparta F.C. #2 / Contraflow (Country On The Click version) / Open The Boxtosis #2 / The Past (Country On The Click version) / (We Are) Mod Mock Goth / Proteinprotection - The Real New Fall LP
Blindness (version) - Interim
I Wake Up In The City - 2G+2
Pacifying Joint / What About Us? / Assume / I Can Hear The Grass Grow / Bo Demmick / Youwanner / Clasp Hands / Trust In Me - Fall Heads Roll
Reformation! / Fall Sound / My Door Is Never / Das Boat (edit) / Systematic Abuse - Reformation Post-TLC
Alton Towers / Wolf Kidult Man / 50 Year Old Man (edit) / I've Been Duped / Can Can Summer / Tommy Shooter / Senior Twilight Stock Replacer - Imperial Wax Solvent
O.F.Y.C. Showcase / Bury Pts. 1+3 / Hot Cake / Slippy Floor (edit) / Chino - Your Future Our Clutter
Taking Off / Nate Will Not Return / Greenway / I've Seen Them Come / Age Of Chang - Ersatz GB
Sir William Wray / Hittite Man / Victrola Time - Re-Mit
Mister Rode - The Remainderer
Dedication Not Medication (LP version) / Auto Chip 2014-2016 / Quit iPhone - Sub-Lingual Tablet
Wise Ol' Man (edit) / All Leave Cancelled - Wise Ol' Man
Fol De Rol / Brillo De Facto / O! Zztrrk Man / Groundsboy - New Facts Emerge

And these MES guest appearances:
Not Clean - Ghostigital
Fledermaus Can't Get It / The Rhinohead / Family Feud / Duckrog / Chicken Yiamas / That Sound Wiped / Dearest Friends - von Sudenfed
Real Good Time Together / Mettle Claw - MES & Ed Blarney
Blow Up Muscles - MES
Molocular Meditation / VS Cancelled - MES & Jan St. Wener

missing "Loadstones" but lots of great stuff in there!

Interesting article in Record Collector (Luke Haines) suggesting that "Your future our clutter" was the last one where Mark sounded like himself, and "Ersatz" had a drastically different voice, possibly because illness. Being as how YFOC was the last fall album I got, I'll have to use your picks to catch up with.

Gerald’s selection is missing OFYC’s most breathtaking track! But excellent work otherwise

Great work even though you've missed out loads of my faves etc grumble ;)

Don't sleep on the Imperial Wax (the band) album btw. I think it's their second best behind OFYC, and I LIKE latter-day Fall

Auto Chip 2014-2016 is miraculous though yeah. I think Smith is a big part of that one though! HOW BAD ARE ENGLISH MUSICIANS!

My journey started with this, which I loved and stewed over for a few months:

https://img.discogs.com/EOwNbN0eeT2dyA_Z045PP7INobo=/fit-in/543x544/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-617685-1193743949.jpeg.jpg

Then, I just dove into a deep end with this, thanks to a well-timed Borders gift card blessing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Completepeelsessions.jpg

Only then did I start picking up reissues of the older stuff and keeping up with the then current albums as they came out.

tough to go wrong with those at your first two, tbh

*as* your first two

I mean, it worked! Turned me into a huge fan.

Oh the Peel box is absolutely epic, but I always figured it was overdose for a new fan. The two that got me into the fold were "Palace Of Swords Reversed" (still one of my all-time favorite compilations) and "A-Sides 84-89".

My first was 458489 A-Sides, which I immediately liked, but I don’t think I truly “got” it until I heard Grotesque.

"Words of Expectation" on the first disc in the Peel Set is my very favorite thing in the world

discovered the fall in 89 with bend sinister when i found it on sale at woolworths. quickly acquired all of the beggars banquet albums as they were easily available, then it was palace of swords reversed that introduced me to the early fall stuff.

mine was hearing "The Man Whose Head Expanded" on the radio around time of release, first record I heard/got was Wonderful & Frightening World

wonderful & frightening world was for the longest time my least liked album... i had the cassette version with tons of extra tracks and it was just too much to take! now it's my favorite.

yep, I love that tape version

Loved the b-sides collection . some weird shit.
first saw them around Xmas 83 then several times over the next couple of years. Probably last in Belfast in like 95.

LOve that Dragnet, Hex Enduction era and a little later. Not really investigated their later years overmuch.

The BBC history documentary was quite good too.

i started with Grotesque and it worked, had everything in short order afterwards

I'd heard "Bingo Master" on the Rhino DiY Uk Punk II comp in the mid-'90s and the way MES's vox didn't quite sit on the beat unnerved me a bit. Nonetheless in 2000, when Early Years 77-79 was reissued, I decided to take the plunge and found I liked this slightly off-center approach, with the dinky electric piano and this guy who sounded kind of punk but seemed to put himself somewhere above it, and I wanted more. A year as a student (MES be not proud) in England then made it possible to track down most of the studio albums, where the real catalyst for my fandom was 458489 A-Sides.

For me one of the magical things about a lot of Fall albums (Hex, Frenz, Unutterable, and Reformation were examples) was how they would be opaque at first, still baffling on the second listen, and then would suddenly click on the third. Some were more immediate (Infotainment, Marshall Suite, Dragnet), a few never quite got there (Kurious Oranj, Middle Class Revolt) and one seemed like a dud but after several listens over a few years eventually became a lower-tier favorite (Cerebral Caustic).

I'm not sure the post-YFOC stuff has that thing there that takes extra listens to "get," though I quite like a couple of these (Re-Mit is a bit skimpy but fun, SLT has the best overall quality of the Cherry Red albums).

I think if I were advising a newcomer who was actually interested in physical product (do these exist?), you could do a lot worse than Cherry Red's singles box, despite its somewhat dubious logic in terms of B-side selection — you could choose the A-sides only option. The first disc of both comps, from "Bingo Master" through "Cruiser's Creek," makes about as good a case for the greatness of The Fall as any single disc I've heard.

Cassette version of wonderful and frightening was my intro to the fall as well
True it’s an enormous amount of music but you only had to listen to one side at a time