The Fall – The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall

The sound of a clumsily brilliant band figuring out how to harness their increasingly practiced musical chops while retaining the chaos required of Mark E. Smith’s lifelong project, The Wonderful and Frightening World … is the first to feature guitarist Brix E. Smith, who singlehandedly changed the sound of the band. Coupled with Craig Scanlon’s distinctive rhythm guitar tone and increasingly sophisticated percussion of Karl Burns and Paul Hanley, the Fall make the first step of their Great Leap Forward that occurred throughout the 1980s. And Smith? The acerbic lyricist/squawker opens with a typically inscrutable bit of  gothic darkness: “Armageddon/This beautiful tree/Boo hoo/Give up living.” On “Slang King,” guest vocalist Gavin Friday offers poetic gibberish of the highest order, each line a bafflingly beautiful bit of Smith-penned word jumble. “Bottle of Brut and nausea/Magazine/It’s no longer a journey down the road for him/It is now escape route.” And “Bug Day” is a post-punk goth nightmare: “Three moths shivered/Green moths shivered/Cockroaches moldered in the ground/Tonguehorns belched fire.” — Randall