Mark E. Smith has helmed the Fall for a full 30 years. It's pretty mind-blowing to think of them as the institution they've become-- this band has always been so strange, prolific, and unpredictable, and Smith has built his oddball ranting into a sort of brand by sheer force of will. Because of the group's constantly shifting lineups, they've just as capable of releasing several masterpieces in a row as they'd be following them up with two puzzling disasters.
Since signing to Narnack in 2003, the Fall had been on one of their good runs: 2004's Real New Fall LP was their best album in ages, Smith had assembled players with nearly as much punch and muscle as the Burns/Hanley/Rogers/Scanlon/Brix crew that made the band's greatest stretch of classic in the early to mid-80s, and 2005's Fall Heads Roll was a solid second act in Smith's mini-renaissance. The Fall were storming across America with all cylinders firing in 2006 when something strange happened: Smith and his keyboardist/wife Eleni Poulou woke up in Phoenix to find the rest of the band gone, back to the UK unannounced. Only the band members know what happened to make them leave-- and Smith does have a history of cantankerous relations with his musicians-- but at any rate, Smith and Poulou were stuck in the U.S. in the middle of a tour with no rhythm section.
So they kept touring, naturally. The first thing to realize is that the Fall aren't really a band in the usual sense. It's MES & Musicians Currently in His Favour, so he and Poulou simply scraped together some guitarists and a drummer and kept going. They wound up going right into a long-scheduled studio session in L.A. as well, where they cut Reformation Post TLC. Remember a few sentences ago when I said the Fall isn't really a band in the usual sense? Well, on this record they don't sound like one, either. With only a few exceptions, the album is a mess, and not a very memorable one at that.
I think Smith is referencing the United States of America's "Coming Down" on opener "Over! Over!" when he sings "I think it's over now I think it's...ending," but you'd be hard-pressed to call it a tribute, at least in the same way his covers of "Victoria", "Mr. Pharmacist", and "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" have been in the past. Much more troubling, though, is Smith's tendency to fall back on using slurred speech and growls whenever he runs out of things to say. He does the wookie thing on "Over! Over!" and a few other songs, and it's just annoying, the kind of thing he may wind up getting away with because, you know, he's Mark E. Smith. But I'm not buying it in part because even when he is saying something, he's not saying much. He sounds tired and unfocused on most of the record, and when he cedes the vocals to Poulou on "The Wright Stuff", she basically imitates him, rambling over the backing track.
More damaging than Smith's unusually incoherent performance, though, is the production. The only thing that's uniform about it is that it's lousy. The sound on the album is all over the place, and ranges from muffled to unevenly mixed-- the mastering level on certain tracks even sounds different from the level on others. There are things about the new band, even in the inchoate state it was captured in here, that sound promising, so it's a shame the texture is so scattered. The aptly named "Fall Sound" features a vintage Fall groove, with the whole band locked in tightly, guitars nagging at the edges of a thick bass line, but Smith doesn't do much with it, gargling on the intro and wandering in and out of his usual sneering deadpan. You almost wonder if he's just telling the truth when he shouts, "It's a scream for help that's desperate."
"White Line Fever"'s country aesthetic is somewhat interesting but it needed more time in the oven-- if they develop this angle, it could be a good new direction. Going into much more detail than that doesn't serve the record well, but suffice to say that "Das Bootuboat" is the worst Fall track this decade; it trudges through a sludge bath of bass, wobbly sound effects, jokey chanting, and other sonic muck. It sounds like an incidental track when it stops around two minutes in, but then it comes back for another eight minutes to go nowhere slowly all over again.
More than anything, it seems as though this version of Fall is ill-served by the first album it made. There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile. The rhythm section can play its guts out, but if Mark E. Smith isn't leading the charge and dripping acid, it won't come to much good. Reformation Post TLC is ultimately a record that was made out of stubbornness, and one that almost certainly could have been better if they'd taken more time to write and rehearse it before recording it.
