The Fall - Bend Sinister (Beggar's Banquet)

Most fans would rate the earlier Perverted By Langauge, The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall and This Nation’s Saving Grace as the high points of this particular incarnation of The Fall’s discography, but this 1986 release was the first Fall album I ever bought, so it holds a special, even singular, meaning for me. For me, no other band captured the enraging bleakness, the deterioration and the stagnation, and the feeling of impending if rather nebulous doom that defined the era. Even if, when I bought the cassette version back in the day, it was being sold here in the States under the title Domesday Pay-Off. The glances at pop music that define Fall music in the mid-1980’s are especially scathing and sidelong on Bend Sinister: ramshackle grooves and either stone-faced or intentionally cloddish dance rhythms, especially on the unholy Trinity of “R.O.D.” (in which a creature of “gas and flesh” roams the streets in monstrous mediocrity), “U.S. 80’s-90’s”, and “Riddler!”; half-spoken, half-sung, wholly mangled – words are mispronounced and elongated, and the vocalists revel in “perversions” of standard syntax – yet unmistakably spleen-venting lyrics, including a great one from the two-part “Shoulder Pads” targeting fadsters who “couldn’t tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule”; turgid, highly-textured Hank Marvin-isms (yep, there’s a Rickenbacker in the bass-heavy mix somewhere); and a subtext of musique concrete sounds, courtesy of Craig Scanlon’s tapes and electronics. Fall mastermind Mark E. Smith no doubt has taken the piss out of them elsewhere, but there are tracks here that really do approach the kind of monochrome goth splendor of which Bauhaus was in such damned dogged pursuit (“Gross Chapel – British Grenadiers”).

Maybe that’s why Smith has tended to discount the music on Bend Sinister as possessing “too much perfection” and for being “too sluggish” as a result, but, as with all Fall music, there is a refreshing disregard for precision here. Its a dense, D.I.Y. collage of sound produced not by any careful placement of element but by random collisions and maneuvers of sabotage within the ensemble. It is seldom pretty, though “Living Too Late” is almost poignant, and it is sometimes so weird it becomes arch – the street vendor interjections in “Dktr. Faustus” – but there are many days, like today, when I’d choose the penetrating glare of The Fall over the hazy focus of the innumerable indie rock bands that have taken inspiration from them.