Staying in Manchester, staying in Peel territory for a second day, it took me a lot longer to come round to The Fall than it did The Smiths.
This is another album that I could have sworn I'd bought a second time on CD, but it seems all I have is my old cassette copy. Why did I get it on cassette? A quarter of a century on, the reasons are lost — but I have a horrid suspicion that, along with …Wonderful and Frightening World… the frugal shopper in me was swayed by the value for money of the extra tracks on the cassette version.
It turned out that possibly my favourite track on the album, Paintwork, works really well on cassette. There's an effect on Paintwork where the music drops into the background and it sounds like someone has recorded over a section of the recording, before the music (and M.E. Smith's rambling narrative) reappears in foreground. The great thing about The Fall is that you can't be sure about the intent with this. If they'd all been to art school, then you'd know that someone fancied trying out William Burrough's cut-up/drop-in technique. But since they haven't, it could be that they're just messing about. That possibility of stumbling into the avant-garde by fooling around chaotically in Salford seems to be kind of the essence of the best of The Fall.
Paintwork aside, it feels with hindsight that Saving Grace has a bit of all the bits of The Fall that appeal — the rants, repetitive mantras ("Surburbia holds more than you care for"!), krautrock excursions, angular beats that you can almost dance to. No wonder it's their most highly-rated album (by a whisker). Alongside The Frenz Experiment, it's my favourite too.
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