Mark E. Smith was already a cranky old man when he started the Fall at the age of 19; now that he’s 56, he’s eager to act like a child. The first words we hear Mark E. Smith utter on Re-Mit are: “Geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh-geh/ Gus-gus/ Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-blah-blah-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la”-- and in the weird and frightening world of the Fall, this is what happiness sounds like. Because 36 years after forming the band, Smith seems to have finally found a group of people he genuinely enjoys playing with: Not only has his current keyboardist and wife, Eleni Poulou, now been at his side for twice as long (11 years) as his most famous musical/matrimonial partner, Brix Smith, the line-up that appears on Re-Mit is the same one that featured on the Fall’s preceding three albums. By the standards of a band whose list of former members warrants its own Wikipedia page, bassist Dave Spurr, guitarist Pete Greenway, and drummer Keiron Melling have been playing in the Fall long enough to be eligible for commemorative gold watches. But there are no such prizes to be handed out in the Fall. The reward for such dedicated service is: You get to make another Fall album.
Not that stability breeds consistency, mind you. This version of the Fall has produced their best album of the past decade (2010’s Your Future Our Clutter) and the worst (2011’s Ersatz G.B.). Re-Mit fortunately leans more toward the former, proffering a dense, unwieldy tangle of rockabilly rhythms, 60s proto-punk petulance, krautrock thrust, musique-concrete spoken-word splatter, and sci-fi synth-tones salvaged from 70s bargain-bin prog. It’s messy and menacing in equal measure, a bar fight that ends in broken glass and slippery floors, but not before landing a few killer strikes. (In particular, the soccer-riot melee of “Sir William Wray”, the morse-code motorik drive of “Victrola Time”, and the wobbly-kneed boogie of “Loadstones” are the ones you’ll be dragging onto your ongoing post-millennial Fall playlist.) And if Smith now sings like a man who’s had all his teeth knocked out, at least he’s still smiling-- whether emitting Beefheartian grunts on “Kinder of Spine”, squealing like a frightened granny on “Victrola Time”, or punctuating the predatory groove of “Hittite Man” with 20 seconds of phlegm-gurgling coughs, he seems to be reveling in the opportunity to showcase the least flattering extremes of his wizened voice, and present a more grotesque caricature of Mark E. Smith than his haters could possibly imagine.
For all its seeming disarray, Re-Mit makes does make some concessions to structure, opening with an instrumental garage-rockin' rave-up (“No Respects”) that’s later reprised in expanded, vocal form, while positioning its fragmented, formless rambles (“Noise”, “Pre-MDMA Years”) as brief interstitials between the more realized tracks. (That said, “Jam Song” is every bit the meandering slog its title suggests.) And as he is wont to do, Smith offsets his cryptic spiels on Anatolian subcultures, vacationing Italian nationals, and 19th century British politicians with contemporary pop-cultural concerns: in lieu of Ersatz GB’s Gossip Girl episode recaps, we have a shout-out to LCD Soundsystem leader/unofficial Fall fanclub president James Murphy on the roly-poly rumble of “Irish” (“James Murphy is their chief/ They show their bollocks when they eat”), which, given Smith’s notorious refusal to equate imitation with flattery, is probably not meant as a compliment. However, compared to the vitriol he once spewed upon progeny like Pavement and Sonic Youth, Murphy gets off relatively easy. If you need more proof that Mark E. Smith is in a good mood these days, there you have it.
