best Fall album for starters

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