A World Bewitched
Fall
Artful Records, 2007
2 CD
Catalogue #: 35
EAN: 0684340000199
UPC: 684340000199
You save: 25%
The Fall was one of the very few bands from the post-punk era of the late '70s to survive into the 21st century. What's astonishing about A WORLD BEWITCHED, an anthology of latter-day Fall material, is not the fact that Mark E. Smith and company were still around some 20 years after their inception, but that their musical/lyrical agenda had hardly shifted. Sure, a dollop of electronics has been added here, a dash of fiddle there, and it's unavoidable that the band would pick up a few production tricks over the decades. But for the most part, the cyclical structures, insistent rhythms, and punk-influenced intensity that were original Fall hallmarks are present throughout this collection. Smith, the one constant through the group's dizzyingly fractious history, remains the caustic, free-associating Johnny Rotten-meets-Antonin-Artaud post-punk poet he was born to be. A contrary old crow like him is tough to kill.
Tracklist
Fall
A crucial inspiration to several generations of bands, the Fall virtually defined the late-1970s UK post-punk sound. Fall vocalist Mark E. Smith's sung/spoken rants may owe more to beat poetry than rock & roll, but his sociopolitical iconoclasm and the band's angular, cutting riffs and rhythms placed them squarely at the forefront of Britain's first major post-Pistols musical movement. In the '80s, their rough, guitar-based sounded expanded with the introduction of keyboards and more sophisticated production (largely due to the arrival of Smith's wife Brix as a band member), and personnel came and went, but Smith kept his ragtag rock army soldiering on all the way into the 21st century.
