To mark the 20th anniversary of my fandom, and because I haven’t had a musical project in a while, and because I’m hypomanic and this is a healthy outlet for obsessive goal-directed activity, I’ve decided to relisten to all my Fall CDs. Checking my collection, I have 96 of them. I went through a short but obsessive phase when I was NEETing around at home from 2005 to 2007, probably because of my poor mental health and egged on by Mark Prindle’s gigantic collection. I had all the Fall CDs then in print except for a few CD singles.

Major albums in boldface.

Live ‘77 A (a fascinating document. Except for a few demos, one of which being “Dresden Dolls”, available in only two recordings existing; the other is on this disc, this pub set is the oldest Fall recording (sorry to be graceless with repeating the same content word in close proximity) there is. And man, it sounds rough. It’s lo-fi, sometimes to the point of being unintelligibly in the red, and it’s really more arty (not artsy) punk than post-punk. This also features very early versions of “Hey Student!” and “Copped It”: neither would be recorded for 17 and 7 years later, respectively. Great historical value, and it for rocks on top of that!)

Live at Deeply Vale C- (I think I think this antedates Live ‘77 but I’d rather that be first so they could open their œuvre with as bang, because Live at Deeply Vale sucks. It’s mediocrely recorded and they sound bored and uninterested (NB: not “disinterested”). This album’s saving grace is that it’s still very-early Fall (you could say this is the part of September that’s still summer though it’s meteorological fall, before they had put out an album, appropriate since it was recorded at the Deeply Vale festival in the summer of 1977). Nineteen-seventies Fall has a certain charm, especially the stuff with the “Snoopy” piano that Billdude hates so much.)

Live at Oldham 1978 A (just a good live set. It kicks off with a glorious eight-minute “Repetition” that is probably the reason for this show’s release, which nets it an A in itself. The rest is good early Fall. This doesn’t include any Dragnet stuff.)

Live at Mr. Pickwick’s, 1978 D (the mix is terrible: bass and vocals dominate everything, with guitar and drums and keyboard barely discernible. That dooms the disc to a low grade. It’s still good music, but with so many better live Fall releases from the ’70s, why buy this one? Apparently the label thought so, too, because this is included as the second disc in the reissue of Live at the Witch Trials. It once was sold as a separate release, which is why I’m including it as an album.)

Live at the Witch Trials/Bingo Master’s Break-Out EP A+ (a true classic, and one of the first two I downloaded back in high school, though I didn’t seriously get into them until I got back from college. There are so many classics here: the opening drumroll of the opening Fall opus in “Frightened”, “Two Steps Back” “Futures and Pasts”, “Music Scene”, “Industrial Estate”. This is actually not a bad album to start with at all. Plus, this is back when MES-uh really-uh overdid-uh the-uh uh-uh thing-uh to kingdom come-uh, though it’s been toned down significantly from Live ‘77. As for Bingo Master’s Break-Out, it was their first release in 1977 containing the title track, “Psycho Mafia”, and “Repetition” – all, of course, stone-cold steve-austin classics. The single, “Various Times” is just as iconic – the bonus tracks are, if anything, even more essential than a lot of the album itself. The early, pre-Live ‘77, demos – this is the other of the two recordings of “Dresden Dolls” – are included, and the disc ends with two songs recorded for the Short Circuit compilation. All essential stuff. Excellent CD.)

Coming soon:

Dragnet
Los Angeles 1979
Retford 1979
Grotesque (After the Gramme)
Live in London 1980: The Legendary Chaos Tape