The Album Review Club - Week #191 (page 1286) - Harlequin Dream - Boy & Bear

Nuts you've potentially ruined my pick next week. If I nominate what I was planning then we are definitely hitting a rut. Do we want to continue mining this particular seam or do we want something very different?
 
journolud said:
It’s not every band that gets their own dedicated thread on Bluemoon but there are a select few. Rush probably. Radiohead have several. And then there’s the Manchester bands. Not Simply Red, they are from Salford, or Trafford or somewhere. But Doves, Oasis, The Smiths. And of course the Fall. You don’t get much more Manchester than the Fall.

forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

The Fall - BM's best of thread

Noticed on the tunes thread there is quite a big fanbase on here. I've been exploring them for weeks now and find a new gem most days but there is just so much to get through so thought I'd ask BM to contribute their best and/or little gems. I'll kick us off with a couple.....
forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk

To be fair my engagement with that thread sort of mirrored my real life engagement with the band itself. An avid early fan but it became hard to keep up.

Mark E Smith, the irascible and dictatorial leader of the Fall is one of the many reported to be at the Sex Pistols infamous Free Trade Hall gig. This is probably true unlike many of the claims and assertions made in his highly entertaining but largely scurrilous autobiography Renegade.

I wasn’t at the Sex Pistols gig. I was around 13 so a reasonable excuse. It’s by chance that I first got to see the Fall at all, living as I was a fairly sheltered life in foster care but becoming gradually reacquainted with my father who lived shall we say an alternative type of life. So it was on one of our weekends I found myself taking in an afternoon at the Deeply Vale free festival and catching the Fall, as yet with no releases and Durutti Column. If my piecing together of the history is correct they were introduced on the day by Tony Wilson.

en.wikipedia.org

Deeply Vale Festivals - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The Fall thrilled me with their primal sound. In spirit I’d have liked to have been a punk but I didn’t really have the chops for that and anyway history seems to tell us it was over almost as soon as it started. And double anyway the Pistols and the Clash and all the rest were already “owned”. (a slight disclaimer here in that the timings of any bands mentioned and their contemporaries can probably be taken with the same pinch of salt as the aforementioned Renegade- I’m not paying attention to detail). The Fall, barely discovered felt in some strange way to be mine. At a time I was trying to “find myself” and anything that I could identify with I felt like I was part of a pretty exclusive club.

So it was that I saw them live when I could at such glamorous venues as Bowdon Club near Altrincham, a suburb more synonymous with Premier League footballers but at the time I was at school in hale Barns so it was an easy one to get to. And needless to say I was an avid buyer of their records on the day of release probably up to and including the seminal Hex Induction Hour and possibly beyond, I can’t really remember.

It's those early release that stay with me most though, the Bingo Masters Break Out EP, It’s The New Thing, both their brilliant b-sides and then the debut album Live at The Witch Trials. I don’t think this early incarnation could make any claims about the mastery of their instruments but they knew how to make an appropriate noise to accompany Mark E Smiths barbed, witty and cynical observations.

The LP had the following track listing

Frightened

Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow

Rebellious Jukebox

No Xmas for John Quays

Mother-Sister

Industrial Estate

Underground Medicin

Two Steps Back

Live at the Witch Trials

Futures and Pasts

Music Scene

(The vinyl version I have is an American copy that has Various Times instead of Industrial Estate)

For many of you I suspect that will be more than enough but the expanded version on Spotify also includes those early singles (and a host of live and BBC session versions of various songs) should your appetite not be sated.

I didn’t remain an avid follower of the Fall, I don’t know why particularly and when the best of thread was posted I made a bit of a commitment to catch up with all their sub sequent releases. I still haven’t done that but I’ll get round to it I’m sure.

For a while I had a correspondence with original member Marc Riley who indulged this fan boy and then recently through the course of work I had reason to call another from that first line up and business out of the way I asked if they were who I thought they were. Having confirmed that we had a nice nostalgic conversation.

The Fall are no more, Mark E Smith died in 2018 with the Fall having released around 30 albums and numerous live ones through multiple line up changes. No doubt there are some classics among them, probably some even better than Witch Trials but I doubt whether I would hold any of them in the same affection.

It’s not deliberate but following the Housemartins and the Strokes it feels like we are making some slightly logical steps backwards through time. You thought the Strokes were lo fi though….
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Ok, I got The Fall -- is Live At The Witch Trials the record?
 
mrbelfry said:
Nuts you've potentially ruined my pick next week. If I nominate what I was planning then we are definitely hitting a rut. Do we want to continue mining this particular seam or do we want something very different?
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Definitely different: NO - MORE - F*****' INDIE, PLEASE

Only joking - as ever, nominate what you want.
 
Great pick, a stunning debut without a single weak track (I always think of the art-house noodling of the title track as the intro to Futures & Pasts).
Yeah, it’s punky and kind of familiar in places, but even at the very outset, only a band doing something unique, like The Fall, could’ve made Industrial Estate, Two Steps Back or Music Scene.
The two 1978 Peel sessions have versions of several of the tracks that, as was often the case, hit just that bit harder, plus have the magnificent Mess of My, which would’ve made this album even better. By the way the definitive version of No Xmas for John Quays, is the live take on Totale’s Turns, which is simply raw power (pun intended).
On the Oh! Brother podcast, Paul Hanley frequently said that if this initial line up of the gruppe had stayed in place, they would’ve been bigger than U2. Something I’m happy to disagree with. I’d also disagree with the comment about this being lo-fi, it’s very cleanly produced, especially when compared to the follow-up Dragnet, my favourite Fall album, which sounds like a completely different group (which it more or less was).
10/10
 
RobMCFC said:
Four songs in to this week's offering and I can confidently say that it will have to be bad to be worse than this.

This is the music thread, right?
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Next week would be different enough that you'd never confuse them but they'd probably all play the same festival along with the recent run of picks.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
A interesting review ruined by the utterly laughable notion that anyone ever thought Enya was “cool.”

Also the entire point of my review was that I liked it for it and had no idea anyone thought it was cool. But to each his own!
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On my frequent trips into Donegal I am often left with no radio save for Highland Radio. It does a great job of informing you of mass times and that Finbar has passed his HGV test....but I would also suggest that their average listener would indeed think Enya was cool and cutting edge.

AS for this week I think I may actually have something by The Fall but only as they covered "Victoria". As soon as I saw this I thought it was going to be a tough week for @RobMCFC
 
I’ve always liked punk music and I was at the right age for it but never a punk.
Sadly I wasn’t at the infamous Sex Pistols gig.
As for The Fall I couldn’t stand Mark E Smiths voice so I’ve never listened to much of theirs I fear I might be firmly in Robs camp on this one.
 
Sorry found it 2 pages before this one.


I only got into the fall in the Brix years.
If i remember correctly i struggled with them before that.
The only version on Spotify i can find is a double version with extras.
Have you the listings of the original songs on the lp.
 
Lol, this could be an interesting week. Surprised it's taken this long really.

I've always thought The Fall were a bit like skiing (a bourgeois comparison I'd like to think would really annoy MES) in that people either love it or just can't take to it. People who going skiing for the first time either then can't get enough or don't bother going again.

However I'm one of the minority in that i'd never organise a skiing holiday but if someone suggested one and it wasn't too dear and I liked them I'd be up for it despite having never had any real interest in getting better at skiing. Once I got there I'd remember it was actually quite good fun if you don't get yourself too out of your depth, avoid all the knobheads, and get yourself back indoors for something to drink whilst leaving the dedicated to remain out there till the lifts close.
 
roman totale said:
Great pick, a stunning debut without a single weak track (I always think of the art-house noodling of the title track as the intro to Futures & Pasts).
Yeah, it’s punky and kind of familiar in places, but even at the very outset, only a band doing something unique, like The Fall, could’ve made Industrial Estate, Two Steps Back or Music Scene.
The two 1978 Peel sessions have versions of several of the tracks that, as was often the case, hit just that bit harder, plus have the magnificent Mess of My, which would’ve made this album even better. By the way the definitive version of No Xmas for John Quays, is the live take on Totale’s Turns, which is simply raw power (pun intended).
On the Oh! Brother podcast, Paul Hanley frequently said that if this initial line up of the gruppe had stayed in place, they would’ve been bigger than U2. Something I’m happy to disagree with. I’d also disagree with the comment about this being lo-fi, it’s very cleanly produced, especially when compared to the follow-up Dragnet, my favourite Fall album, which sounds like a completely different group (which it more or less was).
10/10
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Oh oh, I see U2 got mentioned. Don’t you realise that’s almost as bad as saying the Radio#^*d word?
 
RobMCFC said:
Four songs in to this week's offering and I can confidently say that it will have to be bad to be worse than this.

This is the music thread, right?
Click to expand...

After you've finished with this, which I suspect will be soon, if you haven't already, have a listen to This Nation's Saving Grace to see what you make of that.
 
threespires said:
After you've finished with this, which I suspect will be soon, if you haven't already, have a listen to This Nation's Saving Grace to see what you make of that.
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What? Another Fall album? You couldn't pay me enough.

It's better than The Streets AGDCFF on a mere technicality.
 
RobMCFC said:
Despite a couple of well-aimed torpedoes (welcome to the fray, @Mr Grumpy, and a warm welcome back to the fray, @BimboBob), @FogBlueInSanFran sees his nomination of Is This It by The Strokes sail coolly into the top 20. 17 votes at an average of 7.24 gives him his highest scoring album so far.

This week, it's the turn of @journolud. Whenever you are ready. sir.
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I didn't find either of those torpedoes especially well-aimed :). But I also didn't expect nor intend to broach the top 20. Ergo, my next pick will need to be something more . . . controversial. But I'm glad so many had fun reliving the pick. It finished above OK Computer. That would have been good enough for me :)

Re this week's pick of The Fall, I've always admired them for trying more than liked the end result, but a few bits of their noise-making (I hesitate to call them songs, but that is not an insult in the least) have struck chords with me over the years so this will be a fun exploration.
 
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