Tomorrow sees the official release of The Fall's 28th Studio LP. For those of you who have yet to rob this from some dirty online source like Michael here, you can listen to the whole LP for free, on the Guardian blog
here. I'm two songs in and so far so good...
Attatched words from the Grauniad blog:
For me, the 28th Fall album typifies John Peel's truism (now cliche) that the Fall are "always different, always the same". There are moments on Your Future Our Clutter unlike any other Fall album, and yet the results are almost definitively Fall. Some are saying this is the best Fall album in 20 years – but they've said similar about the last three. I'm not sure it's a classic up there with (say) Hex Enduction Hour, but it certainly contains moments of classic Fall. The huge groove of Bury Pts 1 + 3 is already one of my favourite Fall tracks of all time (not something you can say about many groups in their 34th year); the weirdly emotional Weather Report 2 (not tangibly anything to do with the similarly named 1970s jazz fusion combo) is one of the most intriguing Fall songs in years.
I think it helps that this line-up of the Fall (the 108th?) have now been together long enough to have been moulded ("brainwashed", as Mark E Smith puts it) into the Fall way and have their own stamp. It's a rock-solid Fall album with unusual textures: their poppiest in ages but also their most avant garde. If rumours that new label Domino initially rejected the album and sent the group back to the studio are true (which Smith appears to confirm with Bury's lyric "New way of recording, a chain around the neck"), the graft has been worth it. With many later Fall albums, my initial delight has faded with successive plays. This one is the opposite: I wasn't sure I even liked it at first but repeated exposure has magnified its charms.
