The Fall - New Facts Emerge

The Quietus

In Renegade, his 2008 autobiography, Mark E Smith wrote of the FA: “You can bet some strange things go on behind closed doors at the FA. They’re like a cult; a randy cult souped up on good wine, expensive fruit and nice clean sausages.” It’s just perfect, isn’t it? He pinpoints the complex absurdities of life - the ludicrousness of this mortal coil - like nobody else. Speaking about Arthur Machen, he said that the great romantic visionary understood that “the real occult's not in Egypt, but in the pubs of the East End and the stinking boats of the Thames. On your doorstep, basically.”

This idea is central to Smith’s work: the commonplace ‘everyday’ as a carnival bizarre of infinite grotesque fascination. The Fall are as much psychic channel as band. A physical place, almost: some sideways dimension where you tap into coded truths, odd anomalies and sinister parallels among the static, phlegm and hard rain. Smith has occasionally spoken of a sense of mild precognitive ability he has, the name of the record label he ran - Cog Sinister - alluding to its disquieting nature. It’s an understanding that runs through the band like a hook through the roof of a diseased pike's mouth at the edge of some stagnant inner city canal, glowing in the dusk. Reality as an amorphous prism that can slip - slightly, imperceptibly or drastically – and give way to the eerie unknown at any moment.

And in these days of deep paranoia and obscene self-obsession, New Facts Emerge arrives at a time when the concrete absolute has fractured into minute shards, any event instantly circled by a black sky of deformed vultures awaiting their hot take.

These are preposterous times that demand extreme audio measures. The fact that The Fall have - from Ersatz GB onwards - honed an ever nastier, ever greasier, ever more hypnotically righteous sound is a thing of sick beauty. Any vestige of thin jangle has been wiped out - good riddance! - like some sun-crazed captain scrubbing hammer and tongs at the deck. That New Facts Emerge continues apace with this brute primitivism isn’t just welcome, it’s essential. This kind of music is needed, right now: untethered, shot through with rough-shod immediacy, anchored by punishing bass weight, grinding repetition and stark pounding rhythm.

‘Fol De Rol' is all raw tallow groove, bass and guitar locked into a circle of Mancunian grindhouse power, Smith’s ravaged bellow adorned with reverb and echo as he calls for “cogs of steel, Homeric!” ‘Brillo De Facto’, meanwhile, veers between brittle wine-stained jaunt and barbarian riffage before ending at a hardcore paced gallop, Smith shouting like a Gremlin about the “asphyxiation of the troll” while ‘Victoria Train Station Massacre’ (nothing to do with the Manchester terrorist attack, incidentally, recorded months before and - according to a recent Uncut interview with Smith - a reference to his hatred of the new canopy feature at the station and love of the original wrought iron latticework…) hinges around a chugging rhythm as Smith intones “I CRAVE DRAMA!”

‘Couples Vs Jobless Mid 30s’ starts with melty Hawkwind-esque hypnochug before a nicotine cackle signals the entry of a riff of pure blackened doom and driving bassline. What follows is the story of a businessman struggling to keep up the mortgage, but it emerges in a grotesque baroque tale, businessman as “elf” alongside “bald mother spouse” who “tortures him in big house! Says WE NEED MORE SACKINGS!” ‘Second House Now!’ is thrashing, country-accented and full of similarly superb imagery - some moneyed ex gym fanatic hanging a massive framed picture of himself in his youth in a new house in the ‘big city’ of “My Image! Black and White! The terror of muscle years!” Glorious.

New Facts Emerge closes with ‘Nine Out Of Ten’ a scratchy western soundtrack affair that calls to mind dustballs, heat haze, standoffs and mescal with a portentous chicken-scratch guitar: it's a suitably apocalyptic end to a superb record - sharp and absolutely dangerous.

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Drowned In Sound 80

New Facts Emerge is the thirty-second Fall album and regardless of who is playing behind him, who is releasing his records and who he’s married to, frontman Mark E Smith carries that idea forward and concentrates it down. In fact, as he’s moved further and further away from the relatively accessible pop he has occasionally threatened since the Eighties, the idea of what The Fall are, and what The Fall are for has crystallised. The band no longer exist as the cracked mirror of the Eighties and Nineties, who warped the sound of the times into strange and unpalatable shapes, from post punk to art pop to baggy. Over the last decade Smith has calcified The Fall. A relatively fixed line up (though keyboard player and Smith’s ex-wife Elena Poulou has exited after more than ten years in active service) has allowed the group to double down and cement themselves. Arguably the 2017 Fall is the purest version of the band there has ever been. This, you imagine, is what the inside of Smiths fogged head sounds like.

Which is possibly why New Facts Emerge is one of the best things Smith has put his name too in a decade, the most complete and satisfyingly bonkers Fall album since 2008’s Imperial Wax Solvent. Here Smith finally lets go of the idea of singing at all. You’re sure there are fine words here, but more than ever MES is really not bothered if you can make them out or not. His voice has dropped into a guttural, tarry growl, 100% menace and 0% melody. It’s driven forward by some of the toughest riffs in the bands canon.

‘Fol De Rol’ is incredible, a circular, heavy-as-fuck groove that occasionally falls apart in a violent mess before reforming and relentlessly coming after you again. It is very much the T-1000 of art-rock songs. ‘Couples Vs Jobless Mid 30’s’ is bass-led gonzoid metal, all grinding tension and slow release as Smith gurgles about “green jelly”, while closer ‘Nine Out of Ten’ is totally deconstructed anti-pop, stripping down to one oddly sad, reverby guitar while Smith reviews himself at various stages of his life (“I was an awful baby… they gave me one out of ten”). It closes with six minutes of that one, lonely guitar circling the chord progression. It’s great.

Elsewhere the inevitable dip into MES’s beloved rockabilly shows up as the spiky shuffle of ‘Groundsboy’ and, less successfully as the countryish ‘Second House Now’ which wobbles worryingly close to pastiche. There’s even a bit of toughened indie-pop in ‘Gibbus Gibson’, a catchy little bopper that briefly threatens a Morrissey/Marr style accessibility… until a discordant keyboard and a dip back into a slurred rasp happily ruin the magic.

Pitchfork 68

Mark E. Smith’s meaty, swollen approach to garage rock may bristle fans of his early work, but the album’s little touches and turns makes this more than an average release for a legacy band.

The Guardian 60

(Cherry Red)

It’s been 11 years since Mark E Smith sacked a member of the Fall but, at 60, he shows no other signs of mellowing. New Facts Emerge, his band’s 32nd album, is discordant and challenging, the singer’s drunk-in-a-park-style vocals the LP’s only consistent element. The best tracks (Fol De Rol, Gibbus Gibson, Groundsboy) flirt with disaster yet retain their discipline but, as is so often the case with the Fall, the music is less interesting than the song titles. Still, Couples Vs Jobless Mid 30s is compelling and head-spinningly strange - a stop-start marriage of demonic rock and kraut-punk in which Smith cackles and appears to speak in tongues.

The Guardian 60

(Cherry Red Records)

The tracklist for the Fall’s 32nd album made headlines when it was first announced, thanks to a song called Victoria Train Station Massacre – a title which had unfortunate, accidental, parallels to the Manchester terror attack. The song itself turns out not to require that additional allusion to deliver something disturbing, with its chilling refrain of “I crave drama” and a midway flip into reverse – a style that has long enjoyed satanic connotations. The eeriness creeps into other tracks too: Segue is skin-crawlingly lo-fi, while Couples Vs Jobless Mid-30s sports cackling submerged under the chugging guitars. Yet there is lightness too – bright, poppy riffs on Second House Now and O! ZZTRRK Man bulldoze Mark E Smith’s slurred vocals. Despite their past volatility, these days the outfit have a relatively stable lineup – although scholars will note that Smith’s wife, keyboardist Elena Poulou, has now left. It doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on New Facts Emerge, however, which continues to plough a familiar, fractious furrow.