Tag Archives: post punk

music

Mark E. Smith and the Inscrutable Fall

Formed in Manchester in 1976, The Fall — with vocalist and founder Mark E. Smith at the helm — is the most inscrutable of post-punk bands. Experimental and enigmatic, The Fall released 31 studio albums from 1979 to 2017, a significant number of live albums, and many beloved John Peel sessions (24, a record number). Peel himself once cited The Fall as his favorite band, as do many in the British press. But all recordings by them are decidedly uncommercial, and Smith was forever proud for it to be that way.

Mark E. Smith
Mark E. Smith

Born in 1957, Smith had a normal childhood, but always felt like the outsider. At sixteen, he quit school and worked menial jobs — something he may even have become accustomed to had it not been for the summer of 1976 and seeing the  Sex Pistols show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Members of Joy Division / New Order, the Smiths, Magazine, and The Buzzcocks were there, too. Each was inspired that night to eschew the pop music of the time and pick up instruments that most couldn’t even play. Each inarguably original. And Smith — who told Dave Haslam he already had begun his music career in 1975 — from thenceforward took the DIY aesthetic of the Pistols and made something uniquely his own. Unique, even, among his post-punk contemporaries.

Forever the contrarian, Smith — in the 42 years of the band’s existence (with rotating members) — never really had a hit, nor did he want one, really. THE INFOTAINMENT SCAM (1993) reached the UK Top Ten, but it was their only album to achieve this degree of success. Covers of R. Dean Taylor’s “There’s a Ghost in My House” and The Kinks’ “Victoria” charted in the UK in 1987 and 1988, respectively, but among their original material, only “Cruiser’s Creek” — from 1985’s excellent THIS NATION’S SAVING GRACE (where the song was an unreleased b-side until 1988) — broke through to the public at large, becoming a minor classic of what post-punk had become by the middle to late nineteen eighties. Their most heard song? “Hip Priest,” used in the final scenes of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) is played by serial killer Buffalo Bill on an unseen stereo while FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) walks a dark basement, gun drawn. It’s a moment many have seen, but few have really listened to. It’s an uncomfortable moment, and the music is similarly disorienting. Hardly accessible. And hypnotic.

The Fall
Mark E. Smith with his wife, guitarist Brix Smith, and keyboard player Marcia Schofield. Manchester, 1987.

I AM KURIOUS ORANJ (1998) is perhaps their most approachable album. Intended as the soundtrack for the ballet “I Am Curious, Orange,” a collaboration with the dancer Michael Clark, ORANJ was The Fall’s eleventh studio album.

ORANJ was also the last to include then-at-the-time wife Brix Smith, whose songwriting skills were strong — even as her marriage to Mark was weakening. The guitar riff in “Cruiser’s Creek” wer hers, as are many memorable songs on I AM KURIOUS ORANJ. But the lack of her presence on 1990’s EXTRICATE (also deemed accessible by critics) is apparent. Still, the proverbial show went on for The Fall for almost another two decades. Mark E. Smith didn’t seem to skip a beat.

“One of the most intelligent blokes [to walk] the planet,” said Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch in a 1999 issue of UNCUT magazine, Smith’s voice (often heard through a megaphone or cassette recorder which he often brought on stage) may have been caustic — and the music described by those who hate it as repetitive. But it was never boring, and often hypnotic. Smith’s lyrics, though sometimes buried in the mix and occasionally unintelligable, were at times biting, even beautiful.

After his death in 2018 at age 60, the British press and world at large briefly sang his praises, something Smith himself would have hated. He didn’t look for praise. His band didn’t sound like anyone else. And his attitude toward music was as mordant as the man.

In an unreleased documentary, Smith said

“It’s rock and roll. It’s all about the abuse of instruments, not playing instruments. That’s why music is so boring [now]. Every record you hear is so well-produced, and the blokes playing it have the imagination of a flea.”

By being so creative, innovative, and on the fringe for so many years, The Fall was able to help other bands that followed them find the elusive middle between experimentation AND commercialism. It’s a palpable dichotomy. And one need only listen to The Fall’s later albums, like I AM KURIOUS ORANJ, to even begin to hear and try to understand how that convergence and split makes for quite memorable music.

 

music, musings

Exquisite Corpse: Another Resurrection of Bauhaus

1982’s The Sky’s Gone Out ended with Bauhaus’ first “Exquisite Corpse.”

As their first new music since 2008, Bauhaus — the seminal early eigthies Goth band that blessed the world (or cursed it, depending on your point-of-view) with the immortal “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” — have returned to a method of songwriting not seen since the last track on their third album, 1982’s The Sky’s Gone Out. That song, “Exquisite Corpse,” takes its name, and method of composition, from a word (and illustration) game played in or around 1925 by dadaists (cum surrealists) André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. It’s now 2022, and — using that same cadavre exquis style of writing — Bauhaus has released “Drink the New Wine.”

The  song’s title refers to that very first exquisite corpse endeavor by Breton and company that, when collected, included the phrase: “Le cadavre exquis boiara le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”). True to its inspiration (and form), Bauhaus’ “Drink the New Wine” is a set of pieces each separately created by the band’s four members  — frontman Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, and bassist David J, backed by his brother Kevin Haskins on drums. With their parts remotely recorded during the pandemic, none had heard what the others had done initially. Not until the song finally came together.

From a press release comes more details: “For the recording, the four musicians each had one minute and eight tracks at their disposal plus a shared sixty seconds plus four tracks for a composite at the end.” It continues to note that “the only common link being a prerecorded beat courtesy of Kevin.”

By no means a toe-tapper, “Drink the New Wine” is a tough tune to like upon first listen. Disjointed by design — but bound in (non)sense by our very need to make meaning out of words strung together — the song’s distinct sections would seem to reflect (as they should) the personalities of each band member. Daniel Ash’s semi-psychedlic Marc Bolan-esque playfulness starts the track. “Off to the funny farm,” he sings, strumming a twelve-string guitar. Then Peter Murphy’s commanding baritone breaks that melody with a rather stark repetition of “dreaming of a perfect world” (reminiscent of “life is but a dream” from “Exquisite corpse, forty years earlier). Next up is David J’s wistful acoustic hum, a refrain of “the roulettista rolls the dice” (a reference most likely to modern illusionist Derek DelGaudio’s act where a man gets rich playing a sort of Russian Roulette until, one day, he is ironically shot by a burglar). That section of the song ends with what sounds very much like a muffled gun shot.

All is underscroed by Kevin Haskins’ steady beat of backmasking and reverb-ladden fills. Then parts comes together, with a return to the center that is Peter Murphy — whose beautiful “you’re the cooling shadow of my cloud” — leads once again to the stuff of dreams (“we talk in dreams”) as he and his bandmates alternate among the musical and lyrical themes from all parts of the song.

The final minute suggests what this cadavre exquis ends up, in effect, becoming: “not building a wall, but making a brick.” These pieces do not divide and confine. Instead, they come together, and make something out of what otherwise would be fragements. Musicians very familiar with being apart, then coming together.

Peter Murphy, back in true form, during a one-off gig in 2019. 2022 will see Bauhaus on the road for an extended tour. (Photo credit: Rolling Stone)

First famously reunited for a short “Resurrection Tour” in 1998, Bauhaus has come together one other time since their initial split in 1983. That reunion (from 2005 to 2008) led to their last official studio album, Go Away White — a solid outing that contains the standout Too Much 21st Century. A one-off show in 2019 would follow. But 2022 and 2023 promises an extensive tour.

Still, no album is planned. Unlike Sky’s Gone Out, no theatrically grand “Spirit, creeping rock of “Silent Hedges,” or manic fun of a cover of Brian Eno’s “Third Unlce” may come to accompany this single exquisite corpse. And that’s a shame. Because Bauhaus are capable of great theatricality and pulse-pounding rock.

In advance of the upcoming shows, what we are left with to judge this particular return is only “Drink the New Wine.”

Is it pop? No. Is it rock? Probably not. Is it art? That’s in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.

But it’s certainly got my attention.

And that’s why the song — as divisive as it may be among old fans and new — is more of an annoucement of resurrection of Bauhaus — one of Goth rock’s most theatrical acts ever — than it is a song you or I will be blaring on the car stereo. It’s a call to attention that this band is back from the (un)dead.

And that there’s never been anyone quite like them.