The Fall - The Early Years

The Early Years, 1977-1979 (1981) ****

This is their best-ever collection of material but you don't really need this, as nearly all of the songs have by now been scattered around as bonus tracks on reissues (Live at the Witch Trials in its expanded form now possesses around half of these).  But it's nice to have these early singles collected in one place, and if I do want to hear such a string of death-defying classics from "Psycho Mafia," to "Second Dark Age," I'd rather listen to them all in a row here than digging around the bonus discs of Dragnet and Grotesque et. al.  The first salvo in the packet is the three-song 1978 debut single, A-side consisting of "Bingo Masters Breakout," in which Mark E. Smith's intriguingly enigmatic collection of imagery that leads the way, creates the Fall style that can best be described as Dylan goes to Hell.  But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.   But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.  But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.  The other B-side to that 1978 screed of purpose arrives here as track #3 and is considerably more conventional than the preceding two tracks, but if anything the near-conventional pop-punk anthem, "Psycho Mafia," (about Smith's teenage gang of ne'erdowells) is even better.

Who makes the Nazis?  Why were UK youth in the late '70s so obsessed with the Third Reich?  "Various Times," introduces the first Fall in slow grind mode, and it's about working at a death camp.  "I hate the prisoners, I hate the officers, I hate them all."  There's punk for you, songs about SS camp guards who hate everybody.  "It's the New Thing," disjointedly bounces and stop-starts constantly for a musically jarring effect,  so I suppose it does live up to its title.  Nobody sounded like that in 1978, did they?  Well, nobody sounds remotely like the Fall today, either.  They're inimitable.  They're ineffable.  They're indescribable.  They're indestructable.  They are the Fall-uh.  Next up they deliver their first example of Fall rockabilly from hell, and perhaps their best in the genre (one of the several genres they might as well have invented because they are the only practitioners):  "Rowche Rumble," a pro and anti-drugs song that condemns the hypocrisy of doctors prescribing bored housewives valium while outlawing speed and grass.  Oh sure, the Rolling Stones covered the same territory a decade earlier with "Mother's Little Helper," but the Fall do it a hundred times better.  OK, not that much.  Not even a dozen times better, actually.  Maybe once and a fractionality better.  But still better. 

I have no idea why "Dice Man," and "Psykick Dancehall," are on here, seeing as they both appeared as album tracks on 1979's Dragnet.  At least "Psykick Dancehall," differs fractionally with a spicier disco beat, which only amounts to them using more of a salsa snare on the drum track, which they probably downloaded from one of those pre-set rhythm tracks that cheap, crappy synthesizers used to cheaply and crappily offer back in the day.  Actually, cheap synths still do - does anybody actually turn those programmed drum tracks on and try to play along with them?  Why would anyone want to?  "Dice Man," on the other hand, sounds not a whit different from the Dragnet version, and thus is superfluously redundant.  "Second Dark Age," was another excellent single, apparently about Muslim women forced to wear veils or whatnot, with its A-side or B-side or whatever, "Fiery Jack," a rowchely rumbling number celebrating the life of a middle-aged pisshead who just burns, burns, burns.  From this one can gauge that Mark E. Smith's life ambition was to become a 45 year old barfly, a feat he finally achieved in 2002 by turning 45.   The getting-ready-for-a-pub-crawl "Stepping Out," and the anti-authoritarian, "Last Orders," were recorded live at some later date and are excitingly belligerent and punky.  And that wraps it up....oh wait, I forgot to mention "In My Area."  It's pretty.  No, really, it is, it's a nice little mid-tempo pop ballad, if you want to give it a stretch and call it that.  It is pop by Fall standards, for what that's worth.

Now to wrap up, I already said it before in the first line:  this may or may not be their best set of songs all collected in one place in a row, but you don't really need this album because you can find all the individual tracks on other albums.  But it's a nice place to start.  Oh, to hell with it, just start here anyway.  You might as well start from the very beginning.  After all, you are going to listen to every single of the Fall's 30+ studio albums they've released in the past three decades, aren't you?