Dragnet A+ (One of my very favorites. This is basically the Fall’s White Light/White Heat, with its own distinctive noisy lo-fi vibe. It helps that the songs are great. “Spectre vs. Rector”, an homage to horror fiction (“M.R. James, be born, be born / Yog Sothoth, take me, Lord”), is like “The Gift” by way of “Sister Ray”. Pretty much all the other songs are classics, too. The band was still explosively developing in 1979. “A Figure Walks” is one of my very favorite Fall songs. That guitar part, goddamn. Bonus tracks are anti-drug-hypocrisy “Rowche Rumble” (Roche Pharmaceuticals being the makers of Valium. This is a bit of an update of “Mother’s Little Helper”, but with the bitter sidetext (as opposed to subtext) of society encouraging zonked-out housewives while locking people up for weed. “In My Area”, its B-side, marks the last appearance of the “Snoopy” electric piano that marked the very early Fall sound. Single “Fiery Jack” is Johnny Cashish sorta-psychobilly and is one of the absolute highlights of the Fall catalogue. I think it’s a double B-side with “2nd Dark Age” and “Psykick Dance Hall (No. 2)”, neither of which are much good. Finally, there are a bunch of alternate takes of “Rowche Rumble” and “In My Area” that have no reason to exist. It peters out, but make no mistake: this is peak Fall.)

Live in Los Angeles 1979 B- (a decent concert, I’m not why it’s being memorialized but for the epic, eleven-minute “Spectre vs. Rector” without the studio trickery. It’s a bright recording and an indifferent mix, so not the easiest listening (listening to all this early Fall at once, I tell you). “Rebellious Jukebox” and “Stepping Out” look back to the year before, when Live at the Witch Trials stuff dominated their setlists. MES was able to able to write enough fresh new music that they’re the only trace of the Witch Trials material, showing that they had avoided a sophomore slump.)

Live in Retford 1979 B (I only bought these “Live in…” official bootlegs because they were individually numbered out of a thousand. Well, that and that they were a Fall recording I didn’t yet have and I was obsessive. It’s a typical late 1979 Fall concert that closes with the finest “Psycho Mafia” on record. Beyond that, it works.)

Grotesque (After the Gramme) A+ (my overall favorite Fall album. More distinctly post-punk rather than punk-adjacent. The first couple of songs are kind of lame. Starting with the all-timer “New Face in Hell”, with its kazoo part, through “C ‘n’ C / Stop Mithering > The Container Drivers”, all without pause rollicking to the first side’s conclusion, with allusions to “Choc - Stock” in the closing to “Stop Mithering”. The second side rumbles and snarks and musique-concrètes and rockabillies ahead of the early-period-Fall defining opuses, “The N.W.R.A.” The North will rise again! The song tells and grooves along to a text about a popular uprising in northern England against the south. It’s mensch, with its world-famous “shift”. Bonus tracks are the “How I Wrote Elastic Man/City Hobgoblins” and “Totally Wired/Putta Block”. Every word of the A sides is canonical. The CD ends with a drunken Mark E. Smith interviewing himself for eight minutes. “City Hobgoblins… it’s good.” It was nice of the label to put it at the end so we don’t have to sit through it. Thumbs way up.)

Live in London 1980: The Legendary Chaos Tape B (I really don’t get the legendary status of this recording other than it was hard to find, only on tape, before being reissued. It includes almost all of Slates and most of Grotesque, as well as an early “Jawbone and the Air-Rifle”. The thing is, all these songs are indistinguishable from the originals. There’s nothing like the “Repetition” on Oldham ‘78. It’s a hell of a setlist so it gets a B for that alone, but it’s not a compelling package.)

Scribenda:

Totale’s Turns (It’s Now or Never)
Alter Bahnhof, Hof, Germany, 1981
Glasgow 1981
Slates
A Part of America Therein, 1981