best Fall album for starters

For Brix-era stuff I've always liked Bend Sinister the most. If you like Wings, there are
plenty of similar dark twisted tales herein, especially the opener R.O.D; plus upbeat organ-driven
things.
Pre-Brix you can't go wrong with the holy trinity: Grosteque, Slates, Hex

it's when i look at lists like that i remember i obviously hear very different things in the fall to a lot of other listeners ;)

I find that over twenty years of Fall fandom I mostly listen to one album to represent each epoch. Live At the Witch Trials, This Nation's Saving Grace, and Middle Class Revolt cover it for me (although I own a bunch of other great ones). Slates, Hex, Bend Sinister... great albums. I just never play them anymore.

"Hard Life In Country" folks. They ought to put that out to the aliens from other planets as one of the best things the human race has achieved here on earth.

SOLICITOR IN STUDIO

wait!!! Grimly has a new screen name that involves John Cooper Clarke!! I've been outdone! Oh my god, I've been outdone.

... by everyone....

Globo have covered the whole of "This Nations Saving Grace"

http://www.globo.org.uk/

(beware the embedded mp3 on that page. 'LA' on the Freak Zone on Sunday sounded better than 'Couldn't Get Ahead' here)

http://vox2.cdn.amiestreet.com/album-art/50-000-Fall-Fans-Can%E2%80%99t-Be-Wrong-(39-Golden-Greats)-by-The-Fall_58327_full.jpg

^^a comp, but definitely made me a fan

gives you some sort of roadmap to all their different eras etc, they can be a hard band to figure out as a newbie

of course...

Oh! The Fall John Peel Sessions box set! OH! you guys.

'50,000 Fall Fans...' definitely took me from curiosity to full-on obsession when I first dipped into the back catalogue. Prior to that, all I'd heard was the Peel session of 'Blindness' and a couple of tracks from 'This Nation's Saving Grace'. It's a great place to start, contains a nice booklet with a basic discography, etc.

off topic but i have just finished reading "the fallen" by dave simpson, where he tracks down the former members of the fall. great stuff and highly recommended.

it's on my list ... once i've finished "a disaffection" ... oh, and a fucking mountain of psychology articles. and "neurophysiology for numpties". tits.

his wee piece in the grauniad the other week ("i lost my girlfriend because i was too busy chasing around drummers from the fall") was fundamentally depressing, mind.

is that an actual book?

what, dave simpson's? yeh, he deci ... oh, you mean "neurophysiology for numpties". no. sadly.

ASIDE:
anyone know that blog that made it a project to go through every fall release ever and review with links to the albums? i just looked at it recently and cannot remember where.

I let a coworker listen to Extricate today, and he loved it. First he's ever heard of the Fall... so I'd say Extricate is a good choice.

Extricate wouldn't be my first choice...Stephen, I wrote you an email back to yours and you didn't respond. Could it be in your spam folder? Sorry we keep missing each other!

If I was to blindly pick two, Extricate and Nations Saving Grace would be them.

The remaster of Ex is weird: The tracks that were not on the album have ben removed from CD1, and put onto CD2 along with the 12" versions and b-sides. Which is wrong.

What do you mean? The tracks that weren't on the LP, but were on the cd and tape? Like, um, Extricate itself in fact?

Exactly that, yes.

That is, as you say, wrong. I had the tape, and I always felt that Extricate was the perfect end of album song.

.. and the track "Black Monk Theme 2" the perfect intro to "Telephone thing", and so on.

that's how i will always listen to it, no matter what.

me too.

Extricate wouldn't be my first choice...Stephen, I wrote you an email back to yours and you didn't respond. Could it be in your spam folder? Sorry we keep missing each other!

It wouldn't be my first choice, either, but it happened to be the Fall album I had on hand that day. He loved "British People in Hot Weather" anyway, what a great song that is! Anyway... I received your email but hadn't bothered to reply since you'd be back on Friday. I'm having a busy week anyway. I'll get around to it soon, I promise!

This Nation's Saving Grace has been in heavy digital rotation for me lately. So that.

One of the wonderful things about The Fall is that any of the albums can be a great place for someone to start, really. Even the weakest releases have some odd, redeeming quality.

That said, I just got my paws on Fall In A Hole (the remastered version with the bonus disc), and might be my favourite thing ever at the moment.

Yessum, that version of CnC Black Night, wot I had not heer'd before, where he does the shotgun sounds, is just mahvlis.

Agreed about any Fall album being a good place to start. I'm not sure Seminal: Live would be top of anyone's list of their best, but who would want to be without HOW, Mollusic in Tyrol or Elf Prefix?

Fall In A Hole! Haha! I dragged my boombox into my bathroom and played that once while taking a shower! Hell, I should do that again somtime.

Don't get me started on Seminal:Live...

Let's get started, Bimble!

DETECTIVE INSTINCT

I'm not so big on the production of This Nations Saving Grace so I would either go for Live at the Witch Trials or Hex Education Hour.

DETECTIVE INSTINCT

― Hot Pants Floyd (Bimble Is Still More Goth Than You), Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:37 AM (4 hours ago)

Ff ff.

I should have added that I never really got Detective Instinct until someone pointed out to me the intermittent 'ff ff's in the background of the song. What they're all about I do not know, but love them I do.

Fall in a Hole -- maybe my favourite live album of all time. That version of Fantastic Life that starts out the second disc (on the remastered version)! It's like I was hearing that song for the first time

I think I'd stand by 'Grotesque (After the Gramme)' as a great Fall starter album. The band's sound really began to evolve away from its earliest incarnations, and the lyrics are some of MES's best and most topical—a fantastic introduction to his worldview.

'Slates' would probably serve just as well.

'Hex Enduction Hour' is great, but it's a little dense and relentless for the uninitiated.

I think I'd pick Slates over Grotesque...I can imagine most noobs being turned off by C'n'C/S. Mithering...not to mention the diminishing returns
of the second side (sans NWRA of course)

Yeah I don't know why but Grotesque has never been all that high on my list of Fall albums.

Also you are right: Slates is better.

Slates = teh sequel to Grotesque's first side.

I love GATG now, but when I first bought it, it was certainly a challenge...

Side B suffers in its midsection, true. Swap 'WMC-Blob 59' and 'Gramme Friday' for almost anything else they were playing around that time, and it would be a lot stronger.

There's no denying 'Slates' is incredible.

Well, exactly, Drugs A. Money! I wouldn't kick Grotesque out of bed NOW, but I certainly would NOT give it to someone who hadn't heard the Fall before.

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.

hooray!

should have added that I never really got Detective Instinct until someone pointed out to me the intermittent 'ff ff's in the background of the song. What they're all about I do not know, but love them I do.

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?

xpost Bimble where were you when I was doing the whole Hotel Bloedel thread?

It's very subtle, and doesn't come through well on the copy I've got (sounds like a CD reissue mastered from vinyl).

Listen in the right-hand channel around 0:57, and again a bit later—I guess you could describe it as a faraway aerosol can being sprayed twice in quick succession. It shows up again intermittently throughout the song, in different places all over the mix.

Ah! The Hotel Bloedel thread. Shit, dude, that thread was WAY outta my league. I read it but I really had nothing to even begin to contribute.

Re: Detective Instinct - Ah! a CD reissue - hmm. I have Room To Live on vinyl. The version I'm listening to though is a downloaded version. I will break out the vinyl soon and see if I can spot the mysterious "FFs" sound there, thanks. You're sure it doesnt' mean "For Fucks Sake", this FFs sound? LOL

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