The Fall- Re-mit, or, how I finally fell out of love with The Fall

The Fall- Re-mit, or, how I finally fell out of love with The Fall

I have been listening to The Fall for 35 years or so now. Been to see them live countless times and they are the one band, the one artist, where I have always bought their records on the day of release, come what may. Every album, every single, every e.p.. It hasn’t mattered if I’ve been skint at the time or enough cash to buy the record 10 times over, then I’ve always got it. It’s a bit like being a season ticket holder, I’ve always renewed my subscription irrespective of how well the team performed.  So it was a bit of a given that I’d get hold of the latest album by The Fall last week.

As I type, it’s been playing in the background and I’m at that point of wondering why and when I can switch it off and listen to something else. I don’t really know where to start with it, it’s just so unremittingly poor. Maybe the best place to start is way back in time, a long time ago.

I know I might get accused of being a “look- back- bore”, but there was a time when The Fall made music that was vital, that had a spark of genuine humour, of compassion and genuine strangeness. A taut sense of mysticism, of passion and wit. This wasn’t just for a brief period either; they kept it going for a long time. There’s not much point in really trawling through their extensive discography and comparing earlier records to this one. Not much point, but I will touch upon it. Right from their debut “Live at the Witch Trials” album through to “The Frenz Experiment” (ten years, eleven albums) they consistently made music that was so ahead of the curve, it was as if they had lapped all their contemporaries and were making something that was more than music. It was something that was so much over and above what could be expected from a rock band from the North of England.

But slowly, subtly and inexorably, it’s changed and declined. From the stunning tracks that made up “Slates”, the windswept “Hex” or the triptych of Smile/Garden/Hexen off “Perverted by Language”, we’ve ended up with the pile of dross that is “Re-mit”. This is not to say that there are not some very good, and indeed magical points, on their records that have been made in the past twenty five or so years since, it’s just that they have been coming increasingly less and less. If I had to make up a mixtape for someone who had never heard The Fall before and tried to capture the essence of the band, then I’d be hard pushed to decide which 90 minutes worth of music to pick from those 11 aforesaid albums. I’d end up prevaricating between just sticking all of “Slates” on and saying that would be enough or picking any random tracks, they were that good. On the other hand, post-PBL, I would really find it hard to pick 90 minutes of uniformly excellent stuff. I know that there are 90 minutes worth of great Fall tracks off the rest of their output but it would be difficult, in a different way to decide what to pick.  And as time has moved on, I feel that increasingly there are less and less worthwhile tracks.

Which brings me to “Re-Mit”. If I thought that “Ersatz GB” and “YFOC” were Fall albums that would possibly be listened to out just of a sense of duty and loyalty, and then to be filed away, “Re- Mit” should be filed away, never to be played again. I’ve listened to it over and over again for the past week and there is nothing that makes me want to hear it again. The past five or so Fall albums have been dialled in, to say the least, but this is Fall-by-numbers par excellence. There is nothing on there that surprises me, that fills me with joy, or even hope for better things ahead. Everything is exactly how I’d expected it to be, from Smith’s growling vocals to the increasingly irritating tendency for the “boys” to show off their sub-Zappa-ish musical chops. I can guess with relative ease, what the songs will sound like, what the subject matter will be and what the thing will sound like a whole. It’s as if the rest of the world has moved on and The Fall have remained preserved in aspic, sometime in the mid-2000’s. (There’s sub-Nuggets songs, a bit of MES’s ramblings and er, that’s it.)

I really hope against hope that this isn’t it for The Fall, but I fear it might well be. I will still get there new records, of course I will, but with every report of a shambolic live gig and Smith’s frankly laughable assertions that their audience is “made up of kids”, I feel that they’ve gone so far that the point of no return has been reached. Maybe Mark E Smith could avoid turning into the Rolling Stones and do something that none of his peers has done, and retire.

I’m off to listen to the new Daft Punk album.