The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter - new album!

[stimpee]

The new Fall album is out and i must say that its one of the best of recent years. I cant yet put into words just how good it is, so to get a feel for it here are some reviews (actually the first three that popped up on Google and all expressing the same opinion - its a good album).

Domino Records have put the album on SoundCloud so you can listen to it!
http://soundcloud.com/dominorecordco/sets/the-fall-your-future-our-clutter

And the video to Bury is on Pitchfork, and the semi-official Fall site at
http://www.visi.com/fall/news/fallnews.html

Your Future Our Clutter

Grade: A-
by Sean O'Neal May 4, 2010

With Your Future Our Clutter, Mark E. Smith’s rough beast slouches into its fourth decade of existence, and its second of managed expectations; fortunately, the band is in one of its ever-cyclical upswings, bolstered by what Smith has referred to as “the best lineup I’ve ever had”—and while a characteristically ungrateful slight against all the great Fall permutations he’s sacked, it’s also a fair appraisal of this season’s squad. Its ferocious, streamlined amalgam of the Fall formula—titanic fuzz-bass lines, wracked garage-rock riffs, ham-fisted electronics—occasionally even hearkens back to the band’s vaunted “Brix era” (particularly on barnstorming opener “O.F.Y.C. Showcase” and the laconic-cool swagger of “Hot Cake”), while adding its own stamp via Spaghetti Western guitar bends and odd experiments like the Ennio Morricone-meets-Daft Punk mash-up of “Cowboy George.”

Surrounded by all this loud and clattering life, it’s strange to hear Smith musing on his own mortality: References to his recent medical problems abound, with Smith sneering about the “12-year-old doctor” who confined him to a wheelchair last year, casting a weary invalid’s eye on municipal government minutiae and Murder, She Wrote reruns, and even wondering aloud, “When do I quit?” His fatigue reaches an unusually personal point on “Weather Report 2,” when Smith utters, “You gave me the best years of my life” as a possible valediction. Considering he’s always in the position to hire a new batch of young bloods and make albums as strong as Your Future, here’s hoping it isn’t.

[stimpee]

The Fall: Your Future Our Clutter
By Arnold Pan 7 May 2010

Call it a comeback two decades in the making—or going out in style after a long, tempestuous career that started in the 1970s. There’s only one indie band that can say it is releasing its best album in 25 years, and that’s the Fall. Better known as a seminal influence and an elder statesman than for his actual output for a while now, Mark E. Smith has rallied his troops to craft a return to form with Your Future Our Clutter that you hoped, but wasn’t sure, the Fall was still capable of. With its ambitious scale and ramshackle experimentation, the new album could easily belong in the Fall’s early 1980s run of masterpieces, when the band peaked with the entropic Hex Enduction Hour and its signature classic, This Nation’s Saving Grace.

While the Fall’s all-but-neglected recent albums have given hints that Smith had regained his conceptual brilliance and biting wit, the post-punk icon’s misanthropic aesthetic and burnt-out swagger are definitely back in full effect on Your Future Our Clutter. Evoking the mystery and quirky inventiveness of Smith’s earliest work, this latest offering possesses a sense of coherence and all-engrossing appeal that makes good on the renewed promise, which is an odd thing to say about a band that has been around in some form or another for more than 30 years. So although the Fall has lots of greatest hits compilations, think of Your Future Our Clutter as the most comprehensive retrospective of the band’s tenure yet, capturing all the idiosyncratic styles that only Smith has mastered or even thought of trying. Made up of nine intense tracks, the album stretches out Smith’s best ideas, from the carnivalesque punk of the opening “O.F.Y.C. Showcase” to “Cowboy George”, with its self-ordained “Country-‘n-Northern” twang, to the scuzzy poor-man’s krautrock of “Y.F.O.C. / Slippy Floor”.

It’s also more evident than ever before just how far-reaching the Fall’s impact on rock’s underground has been. From the off-kilter crash of its intro on, “Mexico Wax Solvent” makes a connection with the Pixies that should’ve been apparent before now, especially considering the fractured fairy tale conceits for which both legendary acts are known. More obvious is how Jarvis Cocker’s ornery sing-spoken sneer was Mark E. Smith’s first, the resemblance never as loud and clear as on “Hot Cake”. And while much has been made Pavement’s debt to the Fall, it’s Smith who pays off the balance by showing how the band he influenced now influences him on Your Future Our Clutter. Best case-in-point is the epic mope of “Chino”, which sounds like the Fall covering Pavement covering the Fall, almost a tit-for-tat retort to “Fillmore Jive”, the closing number on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

But what’s the revelation of Your Future Our Clutter is something you’d never expect from the ever oblique and curmudgeonly Smith, which is the sense of vulnerability and mortality that takes hold over the second half of the album. It might have taken a long and winding road to get there, but the recklessness and bombast that has made the Fall so vital in its vitriol has given way to an almost tender weariness on the flip side of Smith’s bitterness. While it’s not a great idea to take what Mark E. Smith sings literally, never has he seemed to bare his soul as much as he does on “Chino”, where he seems earnest when asking, “When do I quit?”. Even more telling is the coda “Weather Report 2”, on which Smith says to no one more than himself, “You gave me the best years of my life”. It’s a strikingly sincere moment that sounds like Smith is pondering what could have been along with what has been, as he resignedly spits, “No one has ever called me sir in my entire life”. Adding to the effect is the irony of Smith mourning lost opportunities while he’s making the most of them now, on the last song of the Fall’s latest album.

Whether this is the end or the beginning of a long goodbye, the Fall proves it plans to go out on top. Whatever place Your Future Our Clutter ultimately holds in the Fall’s extensive catalogue, it sounds a lot like Mark E. Smith’s saving grace.

Rating: 9/10

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BBC Review
"The Fall have broken out of time, and exist slightly away from the rest of us."

Kev Kharas 2010-04-22

You don’t last as long as The Fall have without learning a few things. Things like how many times you have to play the same riff before it becomes invincible, and how long you have to spend barking at people before they start treating you like a hero. Mark E. Smith is 371 in dog years. He has been barking forever, and, as The Fall enter their 34th year with their 28th studio album, a hero many times over: looping in and out of critical approval as endlessly as the snarling, nagging guitars that have underpinned his scornful non-sequiturs for decades.

Your Future Our Clutter retains both the scorn (just look at that title) and the repetition that have characterised Smith’s time on Earth, but this latest record also goes some way to proving that, while he may be an old dog with a pickled onion for a head, Mark E. Smith and The Fall are still capable of learning the odd new trick. Find proof as Smith becomes Prestwich’s own Jim Morrison on Chino, or in the drones that glue the record together.

Not that there’s anything wrong with odd, old tricks – opener O.F.Y.C. Showcase sees Smith’s familiar, vaguely incomprehensible drawl giving way to declarative vocals, guitar repetitions, go-steady drums and predatory bass loom. Bury Pts. 1 + 3 compounds the sense that this is vintage Fall by doing that old, Fall thing of turning petty complaints into strange ceremonies – “I’m not from Bury” is the gripe this time.

Complaints light up Your Future Our Clutter. Sometimes they’re direct: as on final track Weather Report 2 which contains a number of brilliantly wry lines – “Nobody has ever called me Sir in my entire life”; “Forget about Jacksons, what about Saxons”; and “You don’t deserve rock n’ roll” chief among them.

But perhaps this album’s most brilliant moment – it’s most thrilling and least explicit complaint – belongs to Cowboy George. Setting off in a Bo Diddley-esque, guitar matador shuffle, it’s the completely absurd, incongruous sampling of Daft Punk that really epitomises what The Fall have always been about – Smith seemed to realise very early on that time has its own destiny and, as such, more important things to worry about than pop music. Hipsters, slaves to the day, be damned – The Fall will abide: they have broken out of time, and exist slightly away from the rest of us. They are, as Smith proclaims on Mexico Wax Solvent, “Invincible”.

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Really looking forward to hearing it. I only own one Fall album this century and its "The Real New Fall LP", which I think is one of their best among the 7-8 I have. From what I can tell every Fall album is basically the same but they're all worth owning - the worst I've ever heard about a Fall album is "it's okay" which is pretty damn good considering there's like 25 of them. I'm definitely picking this up.

[stimpee]

Really looking forward to hearing it. I only own one Fall album this century and its "The Real New Fall LP", which I think is one of their best among the 7-8 I have. From what I can tell every Fall album is basically the same but they're all worth owning - the worst I've ever heard about a Fall album is "it's okay" which is pretty damn good considering there's like 25 of them. I'm definitely picking this up.
Country on the click is a great album (real new fall LP). they had a patch in the mid-late 90s where albums were under-par but since 2000 i think theyve all been good. amazing how a band can be so prolific and also be almost consistently good.