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Happy Memories Leave a Bitter Taste

The Fall's most famous and fervent fan, legendary English radio DJ John Peel, came up with the defining phrase to describe —and, in turn, eulogize— Mark E. Smith's anarchic Mancunian institution: "Always different, always the same." Meaning: The Fall have such a a singular sound that every record sounds exactly like The Fall, but, for the seasoned Fall listener, there was always something, on each record, that set it apart from others.


This, Peel reasoned, was why they forever remained his favorite band.

Taken as a maxim illuminating The Fall's sprawling back-catalogue —35 or so albums and counting (with over 40 members filing through Smith's rock sweatshop)— you could flip the Peelism this way: all Fall albums may be the same in style, but they're radically different in quality.

Never one to exercise quality control, Smith has cranked out albums others would be embarrassed to release: quickie live recordings, B-side collections and the like. Many of them are dreadful, and have no real reason to exist; these inessential artifacts released, seemingly, as if to quell a compulsion.

But it's not all dire. Some Fall LPs are good. Others really good. And then there's Hex Enduction Hour, which is almighty.

Born in 1976 as the dawn of Manchester's soon-to-be post-punk scene, the band took the rock-ism of The Stooges and the Velvet Underground, applied the avant-gardist leanings of Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu, and tossed it into a collision of sound; a ramshackle garage-rock racket that sounded unlike anything that'd come before, yet strangely familiar.

Different, yet the same.

Hypnotic Induction Process

By the time they arrived at Hex Enduction Hour, the band had, sheerly through playing, coalesced into something resembling a tight unit. With two drummers powering the band along, and finger-played bass pushed up in the mix, there was a real sense of rhythm pushing through the chaos; and even the fragmentary shards of guitar, tense and uncoiling in strange, ad-hoc bursts, sounds anchored to the main, propulsive rhythms.

Out front of it all, Smith stands tall. The famously nutty, irascible, provocative frontman makes his greatest case for unlikely-English-poet with his words here. There's several recurring threads here in Smith's garbled out, half-drunken, ink-smudged impressions: Nazis, gentrification, magazine writers, the landscape of Iceland (where the LP was, in part, recorded).

But there are still moments that stand alone: "Jawbone and the Air-Rifle" is an astonishing subversion of the English romantics, its story of a disillusioned, unemployed father playing out the pantomime of the noble hunter at night, covertly, with an air-rifle. Who else but Smith would dare to sing verses like "A cemetery overlooked clough valley of mud/And the grave-keeper was out on his rounds/Yellow-white shirt buried in duffle coat hood/Keeping edges out with mosaic color stones"?

Before the Fall, The Fall

Smith has, in the years since, claimed that he thought Hex Enduction Hour was going to be his last-ever, and maybe that explains why it's the definitive Fall album. Rather than phoning this one in, you can feel him straining for greatness, letting it all hang out. It's desperate, passionate, wholly unhinged music, hurtling desperately forward in hopes of keeping from falling apart. It's the sound of a band looking the end in the eye, and refusing to flinch. It's powerful stuff.

And, well, sure, there's been 30-odd Fall records since, but, for all intents and purposes, The Fall begins and ends with Hex Enduction Hour.

Record Label: Kamera
Release Date: March 1982