Music, Style & Culture

| Magazine : Online : Radio : Mobile

Parenthetical Girls

As it turns out, Zac from Parenthetical Girls really really likes The Fall.

As it turns out, Zac from Parenthetical Girls really really likes The Fall; they're a big influence. So, when we asked him to put together a Soundtrack for us, to help promote their forthcoming album / EP series, every track he chose was by the Mark E. Smith & Co. Here's what he has to say about them:

By some kind of fittingly counterintuitive mathematical conundrum, The Fall have somehow managed to posit themselves in a weird Bermuda triangle of pop music: the only punk band that seems to grow more important the further away you get from adolescence. This is partly because Mark E. Smith’s universe never much intersected with the distractions of youth—he may have snarled like those Bromley boys, but inside of his once-lovely little body always seemed lurk the heart of a weather-beaten old dockworker. Beyond that, it’s especially heartening, as one begins to grow long in tooth themselves, to witness the sustained arc of his career—to see that there may in fact be a way grow old without completely sullying the hard-earned work of your youth. More than even his musical output, though—which, frankly, speaks for itself—it’s the obscene arrogance by which Smith has conducted his 30+-year experiment that’s so profoundly inspiring/inspired. The singer who doesn’t sing leading a band that barely exists. The Fall is nothing if not a product of sheer willpower.

The Fall - Your Heart Out

The first Fall song that I fell in love with. Probably a lesser entry in the bloated annuals of Fall-dom, “Your Heart Out” still somehow manages to sneak in a few of Mark’s best piss takes: a riff on his noted uppers habit (“Just look at me/too much speed”), a mid-song “joke,” and the swift acknowledgment of its dismal failure, and most memorably “I don’t sing, I just shout / all on one note”.

The Fall - Smile

For me, the perfect confluence of all of the things that make Smith’s work so powerful compelling: his eye for evocative imagery (“tight, faded male ass/…/take the chicken run to the toilet/…/well-fed in a welfare way”) wrapped so densely in his consciousness stream that he might as well be speaking in tongues; a sense of menace so palpable that it somehow manages to make something as innocuous as smiling sound as though it were the most subversive act in the human emotional vocabulary (“would ask for a fag in Texas”); the control/collapse dichotomy of his performance (his dictatorial commands to his dutiful band members to “take it down” and “up! up! up! up!,” versus his fevered banshee howl)—it’s all here in spades. And when he screams like a little girl? I swear to god, I get chills every time.

The Fall - Rebellious Jukebox

A surprisingly melodic early number, and perhaps the earliest example on record of Mark practically singing—“Rebellious Jukebox” prominently features what I’ve always thought was the secret ace in the hole of the young Fall’s discography: the under-sung keyboard weirdness of early Fall ladies Una Baines and (in the case) Yvonne Pawlett. Extra points for making a deadpan one-liner like “We Gotta Taxi for Mr. Nelson” feel like pub-worthy chant—though I guess in a way, it already was.

The Fall - Lost In Music

A thing of beauty. From the hundreds of possible Fall originals to choose from, it was a Sister Sledge cover that Jarvis Cocker tacked onto that The Trip comp he curated a few years back, and it’s easy to see why—their rendition of “Lost In Music” is essentially a paint-by-numbers rough draft of the sound Pulp would ride to fortune and celebrity scarcely one year after it was released. It’s difficult to fault them for it.

The Fall - Totally Wired

The quintessence of The Fall, for my money. Scholarly posturing aside, simply one of the best singles ever recorded: “Totally Wired” is beyond reproach. Utterly unfuckwithable.

The Fall - And Therein…

From the very rewarding early ‘90s offering Extricate—which notably features the short-lived return of original Fall-guitarist Martin Bramah—“And Therein” finds its place amongst the rest of these more durable offerings based largely on the fact that I get its chorus… what should be the most disposable chorus of any Fall song ever… stuck in my head on a bi-weekly basis.

The Fall - Blindness (Peel Session Version)

M.E.S. is one of the few people alive today whose presence alone has the gravity to justify a seven-minute, one-chord wonder like “Blindness”. And thank god for that.

The Fall - Marquis Cha Cha

Though I seem to remember reading that this was at least ostensibly a comment on the Falklands debacle, it’s anchored pretty much entirely on the titular pun—a punchline that more or less derails the song over and over again. It’s an unapologetically cheap gag, and it never fails to get to me.

The Fall - Janet, Johnny + James

Following Mark E. Smith throughout the 2000s is a bit like watching Muhammed Ali in the years following his last fight with Larry Holmes: having sacrificed his body completely for his craft (in Smith’s case, via heroic levels of amphetamine one assumes must be necessary to keep that particular man machine going), the athlete’s reflexes no longer seem to be able to keep up with the manic synapses still clearly firing behind his eyes—an effect full of both pathos and incredible beauty. In spite of Smith’s increasing unintelligibility, there is a unique kind of reward for Fall-ought-dedication, and this is a particularly gorgeous example—it’s difficult to imagine a song like this existing anywhere else in group’s impossibly long discography.

The Fall - Just Step S’ways

Though ownership of this one clearly belongs to Mark’s accapella call-to-arms of “What used to excite you does not…” at the top, Craig Scanlon’s propulsive guitar line quickly takes over—it’s perhaps the best thing to ever come out his seemingly bottomless riff well (did I just type “riff well”?). “Just Step S’ways” is also probably the most immediate entryway into The Fall’s masterpiece Hex Enduction Hour—at least the one that doesn’t use the N-word.