THE FALL – GROTESQUE
(AFTER THE GRAMME) (ROUGH TRADE/CASTLE COMMUNICATIONS)
Grotesque was the
first early Fall album I found myself exposed to (I dipped my toe into). And I must concede that it was something of a
culture shock. To date everything I had heard
was solid and nasty sounding, it had some kind of production value. This in comparison was lo-fi to a fault, a
record made for vinyl not digital.
Perhaps the transfer was the problem, the issue was not the scrappiness.
The third Fall album
was released in November 1980. By that
point the band had moved onto Rough Trade which explains how/why Geoff Travis appears in
the liner notes with a producer credit (amongst other odd and undeserving
names).
Reckless and blunt
theirs remained the sound of the grubby north.
Still punk in spirit and attitude but smarter in execution this was
garage rock crashing against Krautrock
with a man remaining agitated and amused at the helm. Not necessarily linear in approach songs
could be two minutes or ten, such was always their approach. In other words: art for fucks sake. Them and Joy Division.
The poetry of Mark E. Smith is as
masked as ever, purposely vague and very obtuse. You suspect a William Burroughs
like cut-up motion was applied to the order of his mental extraction. And all the way it houses a sense of
anti-establishment. Smith could even
make the command of “pay your rates” sound rebellious. With a better face he should have run for
parliament (both the band and the body).
It was always “New
Face In Hell” that stood out. Having
heard Pavement
first this was plainly the inspiration for “Conduit For Sale!” They however didn’t go to the ends of caking
their music in kazoo performing self destruction possibly in an effort to mask
the conspiracy theories attached.
The album artwork was
drawn by Smith’s sister Suzanne. Is
everyone in Manchester
related to someone called Suzanne?
Playing up the
northern personality the abbreviations used are revealing as “The N.W.R.A.”
declares “the north will rise again” while “W.M.C. – Blob 59” references
working men’s clubs where such ideas were planned and “C’n’C-S Mithering”
points at two specific cash and carries in Manchester for cut price supplies.
Inside the sleeve are
notes, a “didactic disclosure from the shell of R. Totale”. They ask the question: “is this LP
sufficiently coffee table?” With time it
has become as last year I actually saw the album framed and hung on the way of a
media employment agency just off Oxford
Street London catering
industry of the simpering variety. You
must wear a red hat.
“C’n’C-S Mithering” is
the deserving centrepiece of the record.
Opening with acoustic strums and subtle atmospherics eventually drums
sounding bashed on a biscuit tin disrupt the flow as Smith eventually drops in
with a weird and wonderful rant about the music industry and landscape in
general. It’s a broken history lesson
travelling from Lancashire
to America
ahead of ending up in Soho. Garry
Bushell is name checked being held up as an example. In his delivery Smith isn’t so much singing
in a band as more manning a public address system. This is a lecture cum rally call.
With almost a sense of
fear for losing the audience the rapid “The Container Drivers” promptly follows
with a hardcore jangle and multiplied pace.
With this the album houses two more tracks clocking in at less than two
minutes. The fashion is frenetic.
Perhaps most musically
satisfying is the gothic horror of “Impression Of J Temperance” which rumbles
with a proper post-punk Hook/Wobble baseline. From here a sawing keyboard revs like an
engine as the occasional stab of a scratchy Oriental sounding guitar drops in
while military drums add authority. It
sounds like nobody else.
At the death the
record runs the risk of sounding coherent with “Gramme Friday” before the nine
minute plus outro of “The N.W.R.A.” serves as the perfect way to close as Can like repetition carpets his final
stream of consciousness as he takes on his latest threatening persona. As all becomes lumpy, civic pride exudes as
by the end it sounds like scaffolding.
This is not a record
you reach for at the end of a tough day.
Thesaurus moment:
misshapen.
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