Available on: Domino LP

Fall albums always come out in Spring, but it’s never a process of renewal or new life. Over the past five years, The Fall have become rigidly formulaic. Ever since the ’80s, Mark E Smith has been saying how much he hates the music press’s endless push for novelty and, year after year, he shows us he means it. Heads Roll was the last truly great Fall album, after that it’s been much of a muchness. Each time a Fall album comes out, we loyal few get it and try to work out how to like it – as they were once an impressive, immediate band who fired on all cylinders for about eight years from their formation onwards. Around the early ’90s this began to waver, and soon the band’s grating side actually became a totemic quality for their fans; anyone can support Arsenal, but it takes courage and a sophisticated mind to stand by a team that is universally despised and will never win, as a famous Fall fan once said (I think it may have been Stewart Lee).

Going to see The Fall live now always feels like visiting a mad, dying aunt. Familial love draws you there, and you’re left confused and uncertain as to what’s wrong when you arrive: you, or them? Gone are the clipped streams of prose of early Fall, the witty sloganeering of the mid-period, or even the nothing-to-lose mess of turn of the century Fall. All we’re left with is a conventional rock backing group, and the shouty cod-American growling of modern-day Mark. So it has been for the past seven years, with barely any change.

Your Future Our Clutter is a vague step in the right direction, in that Smith has now started speaking in full sentences again. I think that a lot of the problem with recent Fall output isn’t Smith – whose lyrics are still good (on paper at least), or at the very least funny – but the band. Eleanor Poulou is a good keyboard player, who uses the absolute minimum number of notes incredibly effectively. But every Fall guitarist and bassist over the past few years has been unbearably conventional, the notoriously quick and endless churn of band members pointless if it brings no fresh colour to the landscape.

The first half of this album contains nothing musical that you haven’t heard a million times before, or even a million times before on Fall records. A cover of Wanda Richards’ waspish, harsh ‘Funnel of Love’ towards the end sums up the album well; some eccentric choices made, held back by a weak, unimaginative band and passive input from M.E.S.. Last track ‘Weather Report 2’ is the album’s only stab at entering uncharted waters, the band leaving behind the distorted pub-rock guitar of Future‘s other tracks for a trawling, scratchy riff which is muted half way through by a monotonous keyboard hum, as Mark repeats, sentimentally, “you gave me the best years of my life”. It feels like an elegy for the band – then the album finally falls apart, the instruments each drifting off in turn, until we’re left with echoes, loops, and mess. Was that it?

As an avowed Fall fan, I like to think that any album they unload on me will eventually prove worthwhile. And there’s the rub. As a band, they’re immune to criticism: fans mould their tastes around the albums, rather than the other way around. Any experience they give us is seen as a fresh and welcome challenge. Even their most annoying music is admirable in at least one respect – it’s impressive to make such horrible, irritating music and, as Mark once said, you’ve got to have something to moan about, haven’t you? But the problem with this and most recent Fall stuff is that it’s not even annoying – it’s just boring.

James Hampson

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