If you’ve been keeping up with the news recently, you might have heard that Fall frontman Mark E. Smith is currently undergoing investigation by the RSPCA after he claimed to have spent a weekend killing squirrels with a hedge-clipper. The reason I bring this up isn’t just because it’s funny, but also because I feel that in some strange way it perfectly sums up the Fall‘s sound and attitude: weird, nasty, surreal, and hilarious in a black and perverse sort of way. It says a lot that even during the postpunk revival thing a few years back, they never really became fashionable: copying Gang Of Four’s fractured guitar-funk or Joy Division’s monochrome cool was one thing, but hipsters mostly shied away from the Fall’s vicious, misanthropic racket. Maybe it was the famously convoluted and impenetrable discography. Maybe it was the fact that Smith didn’t so much sing his lyrics as he did spit them out in a leering Mancunian drawl. Maybe it was the way that the Fall’s core sound has always been that of the Stooges jamming with Can inside a cement mixer. Whatever it was, they never really managed to click with the revisionists in the same way that their peers did…

…Which is a shame, really, since in many ways the Fall were the most interesting of all the British postpunk bands: more lyrically complex, more musically powerful, more nastily fun then any of their peers. So yeah, hopefully this will get a few more people interested in the band.




87. The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour (1982)


1982 was a rough year for postpunk: it was the year when synthpop groups like ABC and Spandau Ballet began climbing the charts in earnest, when punk’s original burst of frenzied experimentation began to fracture and disperse. Abrasiveness and anger were out, New Romanticism’s fashionably vague melancholy was in. In this context, it was hardly surprising that a band like the Fall was beginning to feel alienated from the movement… The group started as a sort of working-class poetry group, fervently opposed to what they saw as the dilettantish pseudo-intellectualism of higher education, so it’s not hard to imagine their disgust when postpunk started becoming a refuge for exactly the same pompous student bands that they’d always loathed. Disenfranchised and more cynical than ever, the band decamped to Iceland to make what they felt would be their final album.
Well, that sense of anger and disillusionment came through in their album, all right, because Hex Enduction Hour is one of the most hilariously hateful, vicious, abrasive, misanthropic, sarcastic, surly and venom-filled records of all time. Early Fall records could be cutting sometimes, but this was on a whole new scale, with Smith snarling about “all these smug faggots, intellectual halfwits“, “fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits” and “there are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste” over a lurching, jagged, clanging racket. Listening to it again, I kind of get the feeling that it isn’t so much a postpunk album as a post-postpunk album, with the idealistic spirit of the genre deformed and beaten into a cantankerous bitterness. And indeed, a lot of the lyrics seem to deal dismissively with the musical subculture of the times: just listen to the hilariously scathing attack on a pretentious rock critic in ‘Hip Priest’, or lines like “Too much romantics here/ I destroy romantics, actors/ Kill it! Kill it!”, or even the admission that “There's still a subculture I feel adrift of” in ‘Deer Park’.


The Classical:



So yeah, this is a hostile fucking album, and odds are that you’ll listen to like five minutes of it and then switch it off and listen to the Bunnymen or something (you fucking pussy). But if you stick with it then you’ll find that the album shows one of the most interesting and powerful bands of all time at their very peak. Smith’s lyrics are incredible, ranging from cryptic yet evocative stuff on a song like ‘Jawbone and the Air-Rifle’…



…to brilliantly nasty insults on ‘Mere Pseud Mag. Ed’…


…to cynical social commentary on ‘Deer Park‘…



…to strangely personal moments of doubt on ‘Iceland’:


The great thing about them is that you’re always kept slightly off-balance, never really sure where Smith stands, with his nasal, jeering voice alternately acting as a complement and a foil to the lyrics.

Who Makes The Nazis?



The band themselves are incredibly tight musically: I think ‘Hip Priest’ is probably the best example of this… Starting off a slow, tense drumbeat with the occasional flicker of bass and guitar, building in urgency as Smith gets progressively more agitated, before finally bursting into a frenzied mass of clanging guitars and crashing drums. And while some of the previous Fall albums sounded kind of anemic in places, this one has so such problem: I can talk about cerebral lyrics or confrontationalism or whatever, but even leaving all that stuff aside there’s no denying that this album fucking rocks. A lot of the credit for that goes to the fact that the band had two drummers for this album, so songs are given an extra layer of density which really shows in the heavier songs like ‘The Classical’ or the notoriously migraine-inducing 15-minute-long ‘And This Day’. The two drummers also gave the music a kind of lurching funk swing which  I like a lot, and which meant many of the songs had kind of a motornik krautrock vibe to them.


Hip Priest:



So, yeah. I’m kinda gay for this album, if you haven’t figured that out by now, but it’s still insanely great: dark, perverse, funny, powerful, intensely personal but most of all fucking passionate in a way that few postpunk bands have come close to since. This Nation’s Saving Grace is more accessible, 50000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong is a better overview of their career, but when it comes to magnificently surly and cantankerous punk rock, there’s nothing better than Hex Enduction Hour.

Just Step S'ways:




Why Doesn’t GW Talk About This?

Well, I think part of it’s just due to the fact that the Fall have an incredibly large and convoluted discography, so it can be hard for people to find out where to start listening to them. Also, as a band they require some work on the listener’s end: if you just listen to albums to chillax then you’ll definitely hate them, and it can take two or three listens before you really start to get their sound. Although to be honest I’m still not sure why I’ve only even seen them mentioned once, since I know there are a few people here into postpunk/noisy rock and even though they never really hit big the Fall are still one of the more relatively well-known postpunk bands.

Why Would GW Like This?

They probably won’t! It’s weird and noisy and mean. Even people who like postpunk in general tend to be a bit wary of the Fall, and this is one of their more aggressive albums. But I think everyone ought to at least try it, and if you have an open mind and can appreciate stuff like energy and great lyrics then I think you’ll definitely find something here.