Exhaustively, inevitably, ultimately, it's six hours of the long march along MES and his band of dozens. For a Fall compilation, unusually insightful (rather than inaccurate, fawning, or cryptic) liner notes accompany this compendium of John Peel's favorite band. I only wish captions were included. It would've been nice to have a Pete Frame-type of family tree of Fall members, or at least pics of each of the lineups, however. Also, the six plain-wrap cd's look identical, and you cannot see the disc listings on the back, but only by flipping the cases open. My discs keep falling out of the cardboard box as well, eager to be played! Any Fall fan will find what to like and what to skip, but after dutifully hearing it all over the course of a week, general comments for anyone considering this investment of time and money. A fine value for the committed lifer, but start with "50,000" for the double-disc appetizer. I assume any listener to this six-disc box, on the other hand, has fifty or so Fall CD's (at least) already. By the way, this completely supersedes the earlier 2-disc "Words of Expectation" issued a few years ago.(I purchased the import; Amazon's domestic cost for the set compares favorably, much less than list price.)
Sound quality's great, and even the frequent doldrums encountered throughout this audial slog are made a bit more endurable by the presence of fidelity. Lyrics often emerge more articulately than on studio versions, and since the vast majority of the tunes that have album versions benefit from either the freshness of their early takes or the lack of polish shown in these radio sessions, the production that is stripped from many of the Fall's best and some of its worst songs generally plays to the band's frenetic advantage.
The Fall's official website carries much more comprehensive reactions to the minutiae of these songs, and I will not take up too much space here enumerating the high and low stretches.
Suffice to say, Disc One has the punkiest artifacts, and these again sound better than their often dated production from the studio versions at the time. It's evident how quickly the Fall found its own style(s), for by sessions 3 and 4, the early 80s atonal assault can be heard superbly especially with Paul Hanley's drums powering "Container Drivers." Disc Two brings you through what I hold to be one of the darker periods of the band ("Garden" especially rumbles on fearsomely) pre-Brix into her arrival and transformation into a more poppy-ish sound. Continuing through Disc Three, lesser known songs such as "Gut of the Quantifier" "Faust Banana" and "Gross Chapel--British Grenadiers" and "Athlete Cured" shine unexpectedly. Disc Four pairs a chugging "Cab it Up" and "Deadbeat Descendant" to a catchy effect. By the early 90s, another fallow period gives songs like "A Lot of Wind" even less energy than on the album versions, and such listlessness dominates more often as Disc Five progresses. The 1990s is an up-and-down period for the band, and its mangling of Xmas carols, for example, is less fun than it may have seemed at the time. Session 19, however, taking material from "Light User Syndrome" cd, marks a bit of a revival and the Peel versions of "He Pep" and "Hey Student!" do make good use of background vocals, including Brix again (trying to sing more than her screeches often heard elsewhere on live renditions of many of her earlier tunes) on some of the better selections from the mid-90s. Disc Six is nearly agony to get through Sessions 21 and most of 22. By now, the disintegration of the longtime line-up can be felt, and "Antidotes" offers no remedy. Only the Saints' "This Perfect Day" salvages the first half of the final disc. Of course, the 2003 and 2004 sessions, with the newest Mrs. Smith and another energized, if no less stable, band, show a welcome maturity (and a cover of The Move's "I Can Hear the Grass Grow") and a return to caring about the sound as well as the image for MES and his hired help.
P.S. 3 stars for packaging; 5 for sound; 4 for content, as the mighty Fall does drag more as any fan knows for long stretches of this sonic marathon, best taken at shorter one-hour sprints. I still wish that John Peel's favorite session men (and women) had recorded Peel's favorite song, the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks"! But all 96 songs are here, at last. John. L. Murphy
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