The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace (1985)

Some journalist - don't remember who - once described the Fall as sounding like tossers rummaging around in a broom cupboard, which I love because they do - or I suppose did - and it's funny, both accurate and way off the mark at the same time; and ultimately it doesn't matter because the Fall were fucking magnificent, and insults just seem to slide off into irrelevance. I don't know if this was the best album but it's the one I like most, and the first one I caved in and bought. Years later I had a conversation with Larry Peterson during which I offered the Fall as an example of how bands can sound decent without rehearsing the life out of their material. He pointed out that, contrary to the tossers rummaging around in a broom cupboard hypothesis, the Fall were actually tight as fuck and hence extremely oiled and well rehearsed, figuratively speaking. Of course, he was right. What I'd lazily taken for a loose, almost ramshackle quality was nothing of the sort.

I'm still not exactly sure what the quality is, that thing which sounds like the Fall and only the Fall and no other band ever - apart from the Kevin Staples Band* I suppose. Possibly it's simply what music sounds like without the bullshit you don't really need, practically translating to a lack of artificial embellishment - something akin to what Steve Albini was always trying to achieve. The result is usually what tends to sound like a ruthlessly well practiced live band, so it's the sound of human beings twanging, thumping and howling away in real time, doing what it needs to do musically- according to Smith's vision - to the very best of its abilities rather than chasing virtuosity or ostentation for their own sake. The vision itself always remained faithful to the basics of rock and roll as something derived from the blues, but without feeling the need to repeat or impersonate unless there was some specific point in doing so, and experimentation was always part of it; which is why they sounded like that, I guess.

This one is particularly cinematic in places, with touches of krautrock and the usual elements which seem to wilfully work against whatever else the track is doing - the distorted or otherwise loosely detuned vocal, or the drums on the Damo Suzuki song doing their own thing; or that passage on Paintwork where we're invited to pretend the twenty-four track studio is a mono portable cassette recorder and someone has accidentally taped the sound of the telly over the rhythm section; and while none of these elements were unique to the Fall, only the Fall ended up with rock and roll songs which felt as though they could be discussed as novels alongside Burroughs, James Joyce, or whoever else you care to mention from the last century. Each track is its own self-contained world, even when the literally narrative element is so minimal as it is on LA. It's surreal, funny, grim, witty, grounded, bloody awkward, and mind-boggling all at the same time. They were truly unique.

*: Two admittedly listenable tracks on Another Thing from the Crypt (1984) on the Dead Hedgehog label sounding so much like a Stars In Their Eyes tribute to the Fall that it's hard to work out why they bothered, and apparently they didn't after that.

Fad Gadget - Fireside Favourites (1980)

 

I can't help feeling that Frank Tovey never quite received his due or achieved the status he probably deserved, and I'm pretty damn certain it isn't going to be happening any time soon given that he's no longer with us. Fad Gadget didn't quite seem to fit anywhere even in their day, at least not with any degree of comfort - not quite independent in the sense of the Fall, ATV or Wire despite being on Mute, certainly not mainstream, too early and too weird for synthpop when that became a thing. Fad Gadget weren't even particularly or conveniently electronic, at least not as a way of life. I developed a bit of a fixation with them following something or other in Sounds music paper which brought the realisation that Fad Gadget seemed to be fucking everywhere, and yet I still had no idea what the hell they were supposed to be or sounded like. Then he was on the telly performing Coitus Interruptus with the help of a can of shaving foam and I became an immediate convert. I bought this one and Incontinent and played them more or less to the exclusion of everything else that summer. This was the summer during which I took up painting, left school, and first began to consider that the future might be different to the present, and that it might even be an improvement - at least for me. The possibilities seemed suddenly endless and Fad Gadget was somehow the soundtrack. I went for an interview at Maidstone College of Art half way across the country. I'm not sure I was even convinced an art degree was the right thing to do, but I turned up for the interview and was taken to the canteen which was in a bit of a state having played host to some event.

'Fad Gadget played here last night,' I was told, and that was enough for me.

Fireside Favourites still sounds incredible and like no other album, not even like any other Fad Gadget album. If synth-based artists were mostly pretending to be machines at the time, Tovey went further into weirder, more disturbing territories of the kind described by J.G. Ballard - something pervy and a bit damaged but with a pop sensibility that wasn't quite showbiz, unless we're talking the Iggy Pop end of things; something brooding and a bit reptilian - punk rock with a synth is probably as good a description as any. Fireside Favourites grinds and growls its oscillator driven hymns to consumerism, marketing and stupidity then winks to the camera like Val Doonican on the title track, paranoid, schizophrenic, claustrophobic, and yet somehow entirely human despite the sharp corners; and Arch of the Aorta may be one of the most beautifully epic pieces of instrumental music ever recorded.

LCD Soundsystem (2005)

I love this album but I've never been quite sure what to make of it. I appreciate that there are few artists whose work doesn't expose at least a little of their influences, but there's a point at which influence crosses over into homage, postmodernism, or just plain chicken-in-a-basket summer season impersonation. Stereolab, for obvious example, almost fall into this latter category as the Showaddywaddy of krautrock, and yet they just about get away with it by virtue of the Billy Childish defence, namely that if it still works then you can still use it.

LCD Soundsystem are, or at least were, the same sort of deal, but stealing down the midnight stairs for a secret swig of populist postpunk lemonade; and 1978 was, after all, a very good year. There's something almost willful about it, I suppose, but maybe it's no different to the fact of some people still playing the blues on a knackered guitar, and occasionally there will be one guy who does it really, really well. Here we have a dry, unfussy production seemingly inspired by late seventies disco, just before programmable beat boxes came in, electronic instruments played manually, a live sound, syndrums pew-pew-pewing all over the chorus, and long grooves based around riffs and catchphrases - mostly stuff which became subject to a degree of sneering during the rise of haircuts and sampling technology. LCD Soundsystem, however, showed that you could do something of worth with such neglected tools, and something which sounded fresh as fuck. The thing is, he - or possibly they - went even further, releasing a debut which could almost be a compilation. There are snatches of seventies metal, Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up which might be a lost Beatles demo, Disco Infiltrator which probably should have been on Remain in Light, Great Release which sounds like something from one of Eno's first couple of solo records, and then Mark E. Smith vocalising for disco-era Blondie on the rest. It's only because the music is so fucking good that you don't notice this weirdly eclectic skipping from one genre to another, and the music is so good because I guess LCD Soundsystem don't give a shit.

No-one remembers the cod reggae track on that Whitehouse album or Elvis Costello's brief excursion into techstep because they never happened, because most artists tend to stick to a furrow, or at least few artists commit the musical equivalent of a muscle spasm depositing three unexpected minutes of New Orleans bounce halfway through side two of a Ramones album.

Why not, we might ask? Truthfully, while it's nice to know what you're getting, and there's a certain virtue to variations on an established theme because no-one likes inconsistency, isn't it all just a little bit affected? Isn't it all just a little like those who refuse to allow themselves to enjoy anything outside whatever mileau they have established as the sum of their personalities, whether it be Psychic TV, rockabilly, or whatever? Isn't all this denial a little bit Oliver Cromwell, a bit like being at fucking school? Anyone remember that Lustmord album with the riotous pub rock knees up* as the first track on side two? Me fucking neither.

Anyway, I wonder if this album is therefore a deliberate flouting of some unspoken cooler than thou etiquette - flinging it all around with mad abandon simply because you can and it's fun. I also wonder if I've been thinking about this one too much, because it actually doesn't entirely sound like a compilation, despite the absurd range, with all tracks achieving a sort of unity through shared production, instrumentation, general spirit and so on. It's not karaoke, just great disco as you've either never heard it, or hadn't heard it for a while; or it was as of fifteen years ago.

It's not - ugh - "retro cool" either.

Piss off.

*: Conversely I draw the reader's attention to Wreckless Eric's weird electronic album, Bungalow Hi, which exists because Wreckless Eric was, is, and will forever remain artistically superior to the majority of his contemporaries.

The Fall - Reformation Post TLC (2007)

Being any member of the Fall besides the obvious one must surely be one of the worst jobs in the world, or at least the most thankless, right up there with Jimmy Savile's damage control or the man Jeremy Clarkson pays to wipe his arse for him. I gather this album was recorded with a whole new line-up following Mark E. Smith sacking the previous lot because one of them looked at him funny or summink. I just hope the pay is good.

I find the Fall fascinating, although not sufficiently fascinating to justify my having bought anything since 1988's The Frenz Experiment unless it turned up in a bargain bin, as did this one. Actually I've a few since the last record for which I paid full price, and they're mostly decent providing you don't expect another Slates or This Nation's Saving Grace or Hex Enduction Hour. To give credit where it's due, this in itself is pretty incredible considering that most bands formed in 1976 were already shit by 1981, and yet Mark E. Smith's bunch generally continue to entertain even as they put out their five-millionth album featuring the great-grandson of the original guitarist. I say generally continue to entertain without much actual certainty. The ones since this might be fucking brilliant for all I know.

Reformation Post TLC starts well with complete strangers somehow managing to sound like everybody else who was ever in the Fall, yet bringing something of their own to the table - the usual country garage racket with a bit of a krautrock feel like La Düsseldorf or one of those groups, plus some nice growly synth. When I say it starts well I mean it sounds big, beaty, a bit angular, a faint aftertaste of piss and vinegar, and not at all like the work of a band with a back catalogue stretching back three decades; but an hour of this stuff goes a long way. After two or three plays I had the impression of an amazing four-track EP - everything up to and including the surprisingly tender cover of White Line Fever - and then er...

Well, there's a couple of instrumentals and one of them lasts over ten minutes, and the keyboard player sings on The Wright Stuff, and there are a couple of songs where the lyric just seems to be the title slurred over and over, and Insult Song is probably funnier if you're actually in the Fall, and there's an ambience of Smith having gone off for a piss, or another drink, or passed out in the microphone booth, and the second half of the album feels like 1960s Doctor Who with William Hartnell conspicuously absent every two or three weeks due to poor health. Repeat plays reveal that I've somehow imagined most of this, and the later tracks sort of hold up - excepting the one he sings in a funny voice - but still Reformation Post TLC isn't what it could be. Nearly four decades on and I still can't work out if he's a genius or just some nutcase having a fight with himself at the bus shelter, but I suppose the enduring ambiguity should be taken as a good sign.

Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (2006)

It's true what they say about how time seems to whizz past as you get older. I still think of this as the new Ghostface record, despite it having come out over a decade ago and being, according to Wikipedia, eight albums past for Mr. Killah. Well, I only just happened across a copy recently, and I've been having a pretty busy time of it over the last decade, so that's my excuse.

For anyone suffering an even greater degree of either senility or general ignorance than myself, Ghostface Killah has long been one of the main reasons you would ever buy a Wu-Tang Clan record - a man named after someone from a martial arts flick and one of the few rappers who can get away with breaking down in James Brown-style tears on a stage without having tiresome wankers question his masculinity. His delivery is engaging and so intensely personal that it's hard not to find yourself affected, drawn into the telling, even given how seriously fucking weird that telling can sometimes be - the rap Mark E. Smith on some days, if that isn't too lazy an analogy.

Fishscale - slang for the absolute Ferrero Rocher of nose candy, you may not be entirely surprised to learn - is unusually focussed, and low on random bursts of surrealism, instead seeming to follow a loosely coherent narrative. Admittedly it's probably not the first time we've encountered said narrative - times being tough, selling the nose candy just to get by, memories of wetting the bed and getting spanked, life on the mean streets and so on and so forth - but it's as valid a tale as it's ever been given that the same terms and conditions still apply for half the people listening to this thing and some of those involved in recording it. Additionally, it's worth remembering that Ghostface is more or less incapable of delivering a prosaic line and could make a laundry list sound like a matter of life and death.

It probably helps that Fishscale is musically similar to Supreme Clientele - his previous masterpiece - being a rough and raw summation of old soul moves which really hit the point home, giving a rich and emotionally potent support to the story as it unfolds; and yes, soul music - because we seem to have forgotten how that stuff was once as raw and painful as fuck, a very different, significantly more powerful beast than the slick and shiny suited croon-wank it became in the eighties. Ghostface clearly hasn't forgotten, and here we get something warm with bad lighting, broken piano and horn sections rescued from crumbling old eight tracks and scratchy discs cut in dirt cheap studios. It has the feel of a live band without sounding anything like one, definitely something organic, even when it obviously isn't - the tape recording of a ping-pong match looped to embellish the beat on Dogs of War, for example; the terrifying drone of Clipse of Doom; and Jellyfish which weirdly reminds me of Stereolab. At least on this album, Ghostface Killah, excels at giving you something entirely unlike whatever you've already heard which nevertheless feels as fundamentally rooted in the very heart of its culture as anything which ever happened in a Bronx basketball court in the seventies. It should also be kept in mind that this review is probably a verbose load of old wank, so it would be easier all round if you just listened to the album.

Datblygu - Wyau & Pyst = 32 Bom = 1987-90 (1995)

About four million years ago I enjoyed fairly regular correspondence with a Welsh gentlemen who would compile and send me cassettes of obscure music from the land of his fathers, Pobol y Cwm, and Max Boyce, and in many cases music of such distinct character as to shame me into never again making the association of Cymru with such lazy reference points as I've given here - apart from just now. It seemed there was a thriving scene of artists whose preference for the Welsh language had excluded them from coverage in the mainstream music papers, this being the scene which, I suppose, eventually yielded the likes of Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Catatonia and others. I was never that fussed by any of these more recent acts. Even being able to understand the words - helpfully sung in English - they mostly struck me as generally unremarkable in comparison with Plant Bach Ofnus, Traddodiad Ofnus, and the mighty force of Datblygu, all of whom sounded more interesting regardless of songs being sung in a language I couldn't understand.

Having now lived with these two Datblygu albums for nearly twenty years - here assembled on a single compact disc - I'd now go further than describing them as merely interesting. In fact I have a hunch that Datblygu may have been the greatest band of all time by any definition that matters, at least in so much as that there is no conceivable way in which these thirty-two songs could be improved; and I'm aware that this will sound like hyperbole.

To start at what may resemble a beginning for some, Datblygu's David Edwards singing in Welsh was never intended as an angle or a novelty, and most of what he has said on the subject has tended to highlight the absurdity of asking a man why he chooses to sing in his own native tongue, and whether or not such a choice represents some sort of militant stance.

Musically speaking, Datblygu sounded oddly well suited to those crappy cassettes I once received through the post, Woolworths or Boots or Memorex with felt-tipped pen scribbled across crumpled inlay cards. This isn't meant to be an insult so much as an acknowledgement of their seemingly unapologetic attitude to recording - Bontempi organs, cheap drum machines, guitars sounding like they might benefit from a hasty restringing: it's not that it sounds ramshackle so much as that they were working to a budget of about sixty quid, so it's kind of basic without being in any sense lo-fi; and yet what the three individuals involved did with that sound was astonishing. The usual comparison is of Datblygu being a Welsh version of the Fall in reference to a certain loose quality, but it's not a great comparison, and you might just as well throw Wire or Einstürzende Neubauten into the pot. Einstürzende Neubauten might seem like a lazy reference to another band singing songs in languages besides English, but there's something in their forging music from ruggedly atonal sources, which is sort of what Datblygu do aside from the detail of the sources actually being musical instruments. Sometimes it's a horrible detuned racket, like that of Pabel Len until the point at which those twanging upper strings come in and it all sounds momentarily and paradoxically beautiful. At other times it's electropop, or it's pensive country and western - and I mean the real stuff with the twanging and the slide guitar as enjoyed by old codgers in trucks rather than Mojo readers recently moving on from Nirvana - or it's Bertolt Brecht, the Residents, children's novelty records, and despite the range, it always takes a couple of moments before you're able to tell just what it is that they're doing differently.

It's hard to really pinpoint what's so great about these songs. Technically they're kind of basic in places, nothing too fancy, occasionally chaotic; and yet even without any clear idea of subject given that my understanding of Welsh is limited at best, the emotional force is astonishing, at least enough to bring one close to tears under certain circumstances. These are generally not what you would call happy songs, although neither are they entirely depressive, ranging from spiky, angry, and sardonic to quietly thoughtful without incurring schizophrenia; and like the band, the songs are uncompromising and ruthlessly honest, because even when you can't understand what's being said, you can just tell by the tone.

Mobb Deep - The Infamous (1995)

I was kind of off the New York MCs for a while back there, mainly because every last one of them sounded like he was gargling about a pint of liquid bogies up in the back of his schnozzle, and it all seemed to blend into a generic snotty whine of some slightly bored sounding guy telling you either that his pants just fell down or that he's actually the richest man who ever lived, punctuated with sniffles. With hindsight I realise that my ear was simply pointed in the wrong direction for a couple of months, that being the direction in which one finds Noreaga, but it was enough to unfortunately dim the appeal of Mobb Deep. I'd heard them guest on other people's tracks, and whilst I could sort of see they had some use, I imagined a whole album would probably be weighed down with bogie action and would almost certainly feature a couple of tracks where the rapping was reduced to just coughing and sneezing, maybe a few of those farts you only ever hear when someone is on their death bed with the sound of some guy sobbing quietly in the background; all of which just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Musically this one represents Mobb Deep when they were at their best by my duly schooled reckoning, at their most darkly atmospheric - not quite the smokey monochrome of the jazz basement at four in the morning so much as being stood outside it in the pissing rain and freezing cold. The beats are right up front with the music as something heard in the distance, a broken piano, an echoing horn or some speaker cracking bass pumped out of a car at the lights three blocks away. For something with so few components, it's astonishing how much it does; and for something which sounded like quite a few other things from the same era - particularly as produced by Large Professor and the RZA - it's astonishing how this sounds so much like it's own thing, and how little it sounds like an album recorded two decades ago.

This is probably down to subject matter, namely the timeless theme of life kicking you in the teeth over and over, which is unfortunately as valid today as it ever was; and carries particular conviction here as Mobb Deep always sounded like they hadn't eaten for three days; and if such a description still doesn't quite do it, you can sort of reverse engineer Sleaford Mods back to this album providing you don't mind a wholesale swapping around of all the cultural references. If nothing else it at least makes more sense than Sleaford Mods as the Fall fronted by John Cooper Clarke or whatever it is this week.

As is probably obvious, it didn't take me too long to realise I was just listening to the wrong stuff where New York was concerned, and The Infamous was amongst the more simultaneously terrifying and exciting affirmations of this realisation. Twenty years later it still sounds like one of the hardest records ever made, definitely in rap terms, and certainly up there with Illmatic, Ready to Die and other more generally willingly acknowledged masterpieces. Survival of the Fittest, Temperature's Rising and Shook Ones would alone be enough to support its status, but there's a whole hour of this seriously hungry shit, and every last toot and fart of such power as to make the act of writing about it more or less redundant.

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted (2014)

When I first heard Mr. Jolly Fucker by Sleaford Mods I felt compelled to seek out more, so startled was I by the sound - so basic, so exciting, and so face-punchingly angry. Within a couple of hours of poking around on YouTube, I knew I needed to get my hands on every last squeak and fart ever recorded by this group. It was therefore a bit disappointing to realise they - or he if you insist - had already pooped out at least four albums of material that I would probably never get to hear, despite this being the age of everything that ever existed becoming available once again. I used to be so good at this sort of thing, knowing what was out there and what was what, as a stack of early Foetus singles and Unkommuniti tapes are my witness.

Retweeted, collecting the best of that early stuff, was therefore well worth the wait, and well worth the additional wait of my having to buy an amplifier and record player so I could play the thing.

I can sort of see why the band - now that there's definitely two of them - seem to have drawn a line between this - mostly Jason Williamson and others - and Austerity Dogs onwards with Andrew Fearne pushing the buttons. It's hard to tell quite what the difference is, but there definitely is one. I never quite got those Wu-Tang references mixed up with all the other efforts of everyone scrabbling to describe the band - Crass meets John Cooper Clarke, Roy Castle fronting the Fall, Swans covering Splodgenessabounds... but anyway, I can see it here, or at least I can see Sleaford Mods as more or less an English Mobb Deep - as has been mentioned in some interview or other. Even without the occasional NWA reference or Illmatic sample, it's that same sensation of taking a piss in an alley behind the kebab shop and it's raining, and you're stood in a puddle with shit shoes and wet feet...

Where the hell was I?

Much of Retweeted sounds even angrier than the recent material, at least to me, although it could be the punk rock samples, loops from various Pistols and Alternative TV records evoking certain associations with punch-ups and a surfeit of crap lager. The slightly annoying thing is that I realise I was trying to do this myself a few years ago, right down to looping Pretty Vacant in an attempt to spin my own yappy yarns of minimum wage misery with some sort of local underpinning; but not too annoying, given that the stuff on this record does it about twenty times better than I ever managed, and without trying quite so hard; and in case it needs stating, the lyrics were brilliant even back then, terrible, hilarious, and strong enough to strip the paint off most walls. The more I listen to Sleaford Mods, the more I notice how bad so much music has been for at least the last couple of decades. I suppose, if you want to get snippy, this is just some fat old codger praising music which kindly references Ronnie Biggs' Biggest Blow and other crap left laying around by my generation, and I should probably be listening to Skrillex or Neutral Milk Hotel or fucking Ha Ha Tonka - which really is the name of some band; but bollocks - simply being an old cunt with a long memory doesn't necessarily render one's experience any less valid or even vital than that of a twenty-year old told to wait another two decades before forming an opinion. So maybe this is old people's music because teenagers spend their money on ringtones of autotuned Pokémon themes rather than Sleaford Mods, but so what, and does it really matter?

Jason Williamson's sleeve notes state that he isn't particularly proud of these old tracks, which I can sort of understand, although he probably should be, not least once you consider the competition. Retweeted remains a genuine racket, a real joyful noise, and it does what music was always supposed to do, and which not much of it has been doing for a while.