The
Fall
Your
Future Our Clutter (Domino Recording Co)
Bury, the second track from the
new Fall album is a song in three parts. Or more pertinently
the same song played three times. First is a short burst of
straight-to-cassette rehearsal room riffs. Second is a recording
that may even have had some EQ - punching through the speakers
before morphing into its third, fully realised form: a snarling
Fall masterpiece.
The evolution of the song, from
tape rumble to wide screen stereo, is a metaphor for what
Mark E Smith has been living through recently. “The
thing about that was, I started the song when I was in a wheelchair
and I’d just broken my leg. I was on these bloody German
painkillers, so the track moves from me being in a wheelchair,
to semi-standing, to standing.” As well as providing
a glimpse into the recording process Bury rocks like raw fury.
On Your Future Our Clutter,
The Fall and Mark E Smith are standing tall with a glint in
their eye. The album, like the band’s current line–up,
is lean and fast. The Fall at their forward moving, bone shaking
best. Smith, rarely deluded about the virtues of musicians,
can testify to the results audible on the record: “I
love this band, it’s the best I’ve ever had, I
suppose I would say that but there you are.”
Album opener O.F.Y.C Showcase fuses
M60 motorik with drag racing riffs as Smith shouts the album’s
title with delirious intent. A few bars in and the sound of
white heat in the studio is palpable.
Hot Cake, Chino, and Funnel of
Love are all recent highlights of the band’s live shows;
taut and spare, stretched and pummelled into shape by Eleni
Poulou’s keyboard distortions and interventions.
Smith has famously called The Fall
country ’n’ northern. Cowboy George is Morricone
’n’ northern. Twanging guitars leave trails in
the dust as peyote shamen make an appearance in the saloon
bar. That at any rate is the disorienting effect of hearing
Smith’s narration of “a story I was told / of
unseen knowledge, unseen hills, unseen footage, and unseen
facts.”
At nearly eight minutes long Y.F.O.C.
/ Slippy Floor is a contemporary Fall epic. After two minutes
of Smith, bass and drums, the band at their most hotwired
and raucous, escalate into mangled euphoria. And, once hell
has officially broken loose, decide to stop. Then a dissolve
into tape hisses, answering machine spectres and tapping hands.
Your Future Our Clutter
concludes with Weather Report 2. Smith, revisiting the voice
he used to such effect on Extricate’s Bill is Dead,
sings with mournful tenderness. It’s hard not to associate
the lyrics with Smith’s recent spell of wheelchair bound
incapacitation:
“I watched Murder She Wrote, at least five times / The
cast deserved to die.”
In the unlikely event that Smith
was after any sympathy, it would be for having to put up with
daytime TV and nothing else. Slowly mutating into a dark electronic
pulse, the sound is stately and eerie, echoing Smith’s
observation that “The whirlpools grow wider and wider”.
As the pulses start to quicken and blow fuses, Smith leans
in close to the microphone and delivers a whispered coda:
“You don’t deserve
rock ’n’ roll”
If there is a hint of mortality
on Your Future Our Clutter it’s being dealt
with by whipping up a white knuckle storm. Into their next
decade with the same intensity they started The Fall are once
again at their most rampant. You can keep your Gene Vincent,
Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. Ladies and gentlemen, we have
the one and only Mark E Smith and The mighty Fall.
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