The Fall

Mark E. Smith is a ranter, but rarely a crowd-pleaser; he's also a Twilight Zone fanatic, a William Blake obsessive, and something of a thug, not to mention, just maybe, Britpunk's poet laureate and philosopher king. He's also the sole constant member of the Fall, one of the most indestructible musical ideas to emerge from British punk.

Using half-sung, half-snarled, sometimes hysterically funny, endlessly quotable lyrics that tear apart class, art, politics, lit, other bands, themselves, and more, Smith spot-welded his harangues to a rough-and-tumble groove that choogled like rockabilly, droned like Euro art rock, and squalled like the gnarliest punk. (It also shone like dance rock and beeped like techno, but that was later.) As long as Smith is alive, the Fall will never vary all that much from this singular, highly rhythmic racket, but they sure as hell don't sound like anyone else, and generations of indie rockers have stolen from Smith as if his name were Chuck Berry.

Add all of this genius to an obscenely huge discography and you have the makings of a serious-ass cult act. Devout Fall fans argue about their favorite albums like rabbis hashing out the Talmud. Most regular humans don't need more than a few of these albums, but everyone needs at least one; any of the '80s singles collections are excellent places to start.

Live at the Witch Trials features fetal but nifty workouts of an aesthetic that was discovered quickly and subsequently refined endlessly. As "Crap Rap" puts it, "We're the crap that talks back." Look for this as a theme throughout Smith's career, people. An excellent debut, but not too far from punkodoxy.

Dragnet is the first record with brilliant guitarist Craig Scanlon, who put up with Smith longer than anyone else. The Fall has never sounded stranger than on this dank, appallingly recorded, and fascinating album. (Not to mention self-aware: "I don't sing/I just shout.") Totale's Turns is the first of roughly 1 billion live albums, all of which have moments of high rant and rough, tuneless lows.

Grotesque is the first truly great Fall album, the sound of pieces coming together: the trebly guitar, the weird groove (the amazing "New Face in Hell," which clearly changed Pavement's life), and That Voice spitting, yelling, and jabbering his bent, sinister vision, sneering at the middle-class liberals on "En glish Scheme" and shouting out his hometown ("The N.W.R.A."). Fantastic.

Early Years 1977-1979, Early Singles, and It's the New Thing!: The Step Forward Years all cover much the same territory, and many of these songs show up as bonus tracks on early '00s pressings of albums from the same era. The "definitive rants" on the Slates EP, the endlessly powerful Hex Enduction Hour, and the slightly less great Room to Live finish out the Fall's first era on a spectacular high. On Slates' six spotless tunelets, Smith's dissections get sharper still (the self-defining "Prole Art Threat," "An Older Lover") as the music's palette opens up (outta-nowhere acoustic guitar on "Fit and Working Again"). Slates can be found on CD with the solid live album A Part of America Therein.

Hex . . . adds a second drummer and higher-fidelity production, turning the smart bombs into a fucking freight train. "The Classical," "Fortress/Deer Park," and the anticritic "Hip Priest" all shine, and Smith has never sounded so . . . large, like an indestructible Saxon magus, totally in control of his singular vision. The weaker followup, Room to Live, sports fabulously irritated lyrics aimed squarely at bourgeois Britain ("Hard Life in Country" and the title track) undercut by thinner, less compelling music and an uninterested-sounding Smith. Fall in a Hole is the excellent live album from this period. (Hip Priest compiles tracks from this same period, as does the totally excellent Totally Wired and the rare three-CD box Psykick Dance Hall.)

Perverted by Language ushers in a new epoch for the Fall; it's the first album to feature the guitar and songwriting of Smith's now-ex-wife Brix, a Yank with a keen melodic sense and, by all accounts, the patience of a saint. It's yet another keeper, complete with a great "football" tune ("Kicker Conspiracy"), weird pounders ("Smile," "Eat Yrself Fitter"), and the oddly moving "Garden."

The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall moves the group into the worlds of dance rock, pop riffs, and mass British fame. The singles from this period ("Oh! Brother," "C.R.E.E.P.") are both fabulously slick and endlessly cool. This Nation's Saving Grace wanders even further into the mainstream ("What You Need," the shimmering "L.A."), with by now typically excellent results, and also contains the seriously odd "I Am Damo Suzuki," a shout-out to the Can singer of the same name. Palace of Swords Reversed compiles (mostly) great singles from 1980 to 1983.

Then the shine began to fade. Bend Sinister is the cranky flip side of This Nation's Saving Grace's smooth power. The Frenz Experiment is more of the duller same, complete with a hit cover of the Kinks' "Victoria." I Am Kurious Oranj is the smart soundtrack to a ballet (check out his cover of Blake's "Jerusalem"). The spotless singles collection 458489 A Sides is a hit-after-hit cheater tape to the Brix era, which ended when she split in 1989. Producers Craig Leon, Adrian Sherwood, and Coldcut give Extricate a glossy sound. Guitarist Martin Bramah, not heard since Live at the Witch Trials, rejoins as Smith takes shots at Brix on the fabulously nasty "Sing! Harpy," covers the garage primitives the Monks' "I Hate You" as "Black Monk Theme Part One," and generally wallows in his own dank, not-quite-as-tuneful bitterness. Shift-Work and Code: Selfish enlist keyboards to ill-fitting effect (though the Listening In singles collection makes the best of the weak music).

In 1993, the Fall found themselves on Matador Records, sharing a label with Pavement, who may very well still owe them royalties for egregious gimmick infringement. The Infotainment Scam does some light genre-surfing (disco on "Lost in Music," T. Rex on "glam racket," 1983-era Fall on "The League of Bald Headed Men") while retaining That Fall Thing.

Having largely invented the stuff, the Fall do American indie rock quite well on Middle Class Revolt. "Behind the Counter" smokes, "15 Ways" is classic Fall pop, and the rest hangs together tunefully and oddly professionally. They were off Matador by Cerebral Caustic, which is too bad, as it's a furious return to noisy, reckless rant form. Brix is back, and it seems to have inspired and infuriated both her and Smith. "Don't Call Me Darling" is pure rage, "Bonkers in Phoenix" is epic. (The year 1996 also marked the debut of the dreaded compilations of demos, outtakes, and live material on Receiver Records. Don't bother with any of them unless you are a helpless addict and have purchased almost everything else on this list.)

Cerebral was also the last album with Craig Scanlon, and the post-Craig years have had their ups and downs. The Light User Syndrome still has Brix aboard, which adds some zip to the tunes, but something truly fundamental feels missing. Levitate mixes drum and bass into the Fall thing for a solid outing, then a few more key musicians left. Could this be the end?

Please: 1999's The Marshall Suite and 2000's excellent The Unutterable roar the band back to life, the former a three-part suite, the latter an absolute bulldozer of electronic thunder able to stand with any of the group's '90s work. The Fall are back, baby.

Or maybe not. The dull Are You Are Missing Winner? of 2001 and the is-it-brilliant-or-awful? mishmash 2G+2 from 2002 did not bode well for the future. (The Fall does keep endlessly recycling the past, however. All of the 2002 comps are good, and the BBC sessions collection just crackles.) But as long as Smith has breath in his ranting little Mancunian body, the Fall will be there, churning out albums as well as bile. The 2003 Fall album The Real New Fall LP finally saw the light of day in the States in 2004, and it's another good one, full of loud chugging rock overseen by Smith in all of his mumbling, nasty glory. The double-disc retrospective 50,000 Fall Fans reaches all the way back to the band's first single, "Repetition," and goes up to "Green Eyed Loco-Man," a gnarly rocker from The Real New. Track selections range from good to great ("Victoria" is an amazing cover, though it doesn't belong here); this primer on 25 years of prime bile is the ideal place to start for anyone who wants an overview of the Fall's career. (JOE GROSS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide