The Fall — The Unutterable
Each and every track here is full of considerable sonic depth and invention, with the very dominant synth and electroinca elements giving The Fall’s highly distinctive churning garage rock/art punk stomp a lot more atmosphere, power, focus and at times epic quilty about it. The synth & electronic textures mix in different sways and sonic genres colours like: spaced almost prog swirls and whooshes, filmatic atmospherics, techno throbs, drum ‘n’ bass runs and beyond- but none of this would work of course if the songs themselves weren’t of such good quality and variation.
Mark E Smith is also on fine lyrical & vocal performance form too; going from his usual clipped and manic rants, onto buoyant and almost tuneful signing, onto swaging and boozy mumbles, through to sounding at times like a northern tinged William S Burroughs.
The second disc, which is released here for the first time, finds the albums tracks presented in a different sequence. And in a much more stripped, lo-fi and dirty form from the way they appeared on the original release, I guess many of the tracks sound starker, less meaty and bleaker too, with the electronic and synth elements been much more downplayed. The different running order also gives this disc a different feeling too- so if you had the original released version, and didn’t like it’s dense, meaty and detailed feel you more likely to get on with this.
All in all this is a great and worthy reissue, the only thing that slightly lets it down the release is the lack of linear notes, album reviews or background information about the album. As most of the other recent(ish) reissues of older Fall records have come with very informative and through linear note, and these are missed out completely here, quite why this is unclear but it’s a pity.