Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Progression, 24 April 2008
I have only had the opp to hear this a few times and so I feel a bit early to proclaim, but the news is good. The last release, RPTLC, sounded to me stronger upon initial listen than after repeated listens. There was not the expanding experience you get with most Fall album upon repeated listens..it was more groove bass oriented. You still have that basis here with Mr Dave Eagle Spurr, who may be now establishing a new Fall sound as opposed to the pick heavy style of Steve Hanley who was at the root. ..whatever that sound is or was. The music on IWS has so much more meat on the branches as opposed to TLC..The breadth of music scope is surprising and the editing is breathtaking especially on 50 Year Old Man (Banjo on a Fall album??)..but there is not one cut Ive sought out to skip over and MES is on top of his game..He seems to talk about chickens several times..there can be no doubt that the book writing appears to have brought out an album that is more focused and shaped by his prose than TLC where at times MES was like another garnishment on the plate..kinda like separate stuff on a plate. Here the flavors are mixed together, come in and out of each other through editing and even a few flits into mono in spots...it makes this the most sonically interesting Fall record maybe ever..kind of like MES really going further down the Krautrock road in attitude than ever. In this album, the mixing has been treated as another facet of creativity as opposed to just recording the tunes (which is how theyve generally operated in the past). Oh and Elena's vocal on Ive Been Duped is as good and catchy as Wright Stuff was weird. That is the other one thing I would mention.. Ms Smiths keyboard playing has really progressed and is the biggest surprise from the last album to now. She is now operating at the level that Julia Nagle and all the players (since Marcia S) have seemed to be aiming for. Elena is there right now and is a huge part of the current musical glory. This is certainly the best Fall album in 10 years, how it will rank against the legendary albums remains to be seen as it ages. This could end up as classic - as I said theres not a weak moment, let alone cut on this new offering.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
On first listen..., 29 April 2008
As a complete newcomer to The Fall I've been eagerly awaiting this as my first contemporary Fall purchase. It may be because I've been listening to nothing but The Fall for about two months now, but I have a qualm with this album...
Whether you're back in the glory days of The Fall (for me that means everything without exception up to - but excluding - This Nation's Saving Grace (I think the Brix era is vastly overrated)) or mooching around the glorious renaissance of The Unutterable, Extricate, Code:Selfish, Country on the Click etc, the one truism for me is that every Fall album is an immense grower. You may not like it on first listen, you might hate it on second listen, you might dread every track...but after a while you find that you can't live without it.
And that's my qualm. On first listen I love this album to bits. It worries me. Will it endure? Will it improve? Or will I get bored of it?
Alton Towers is a weak opener, but tracks like 50 Year Old Man (an awesome 11-minute anchor), Wolf Kidult Man, Can Can Summer, Strangetown, and Tommy Shooter strike me as instant bona fide Fall classics. Even Senior Twilight Stock Replacer, despite being a pale and anaemic version of the stormtrooping song they opened with at Hammersmith Palais, gets me in the head and the spine.
So, MES bounces back yet again with an instant classic. It's that word 'instant' that worries me though...
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Better than the last one but that's not saying much, 2 May 2008
There are a few moments of brilliance here, and many reminders of past success: much of it has a similar sonic palette to Reformation Post-TLC but with added electronic interjections. While RPTLC started strongly but degenerated into inconsequential ditties and lengthy sound-experiments, at least this one stays solid to the end, the feeling of continuous energy aided by having the tracks tightly segued together. This time the 10-minute track doesn't feel like a bad joke at the listener's expense, but is a suite of distinct sections of music, with contrasting moods but also recurring themes. Lyrically MES is on pretty good form throughout - a mixture of bizarre stories, nonsensical slogans and personal pre-emptive strikes: "I'm a 50 year old man, what'cha gonna do about it?" He also speaks for many of us when he proclaims "My boss has the imagination of a gnat!"
Unfortunately the sound quality is definitely a step down from the usual standards. I realise The Fall are not the group to expect audiophile quality from, but someone has seriously buggered this one up - the majority of the album is in mono, and sounds like it's been ripped off a dirty or scratched CD-R (there are numerous glitches and drop-outs, especially on Strange Town), and converted to a low bit rate MP3 (there's a tell-tale squishiness to the top end). The mixing is OK, although the drums sometimes get squashed down in the mix due to the amount of compression being used - maybe it sounded good before it got accidentally converted to mono!
Contrary to what some of the other posters seem to think, The Fall have made quite a few duff albums over the years and can very wildly from one album to the next. Even the classic Hanley-Scanlon-Wolstencroft lineup were not immune to this: for every Shiftwork there's a Seminal:Live. Apart from the sound quality issues I'd say this was just on the good side of average: to put it in the context of more recent efforts, it's an improvement on Post-TLC but not as good as Fall Heads Roll.
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