For a band with such a devoted cult following, the Fall are rarely covered by other groups. It's hardly surprising, of course, given the group's general disdain for standard song structures and Mark E. Smith's general-uh disdain-uh for everything, including conventional singing. For the same reasons, it's always jarring to hear the Fall doing someone else's song. When I first heard their version of the Kinks' "Victoria", I could scarcely believe it was real, and I still don't like it. Perhaps I'm too attached to the stunning original to bother with the exponentially higher level of sarcasm Smith brings to the table.
I'm not quite as attached to the Move's "I Can Hear the Grass Grow", but it's among my favorite nuggets from the UK's late-60s psychedelic explosion, a brilliantly arranged song that married trippy lyrics and harmonies to a brawling mod rave-up. Smith and his latest lineup naturally strip away all of those elements when they tackle the song in the middle of Fall Heads Roll, their 80th or 90th album. By the time they're done with it, the poor song is lying in a little broken heap, laid out by Smith's singing-not-singing and the band's frantic evisceration of the original's complex, multi-part arrangement. It's not an improvement, but it's different, and the Fall have undeniably made it their own.
I don't know if Smith intends sarcasm on "I Can Hear the Grass Grow", but it's hard not to hear it. The guy fairly drips with it-- it's like an appendage of his body at this point, and it gets him plenty of sneering mileage on Fall Heads Roll, a grab-bag of a Fall album with brilliant highs and scattered lows. In other words, it's exactly what Fall followers are hoping for, and it continues the band's recent run of strong work, even reviving a few promising songs from the dead zone of last year's unforgivably sloppy Interim compilation. "Blindness", for example, comes back in its third incarnation. With each subsequent revision, the song has grown longer and nastier, and here, the incessant bass crunch and hovering guitar parts drip with fury.
Other highlights include the buzzing synth romp "Pacifying Joint", a New Romantics-on-skid-row joint crowned with a vintage MES tantrum, delivered in a slurred anti-pop drawl. "Bo D" blazes on a mind-fuck Bo Diddley beat, but Smith seems to be ranting about Bo Derek as much as the man who gave rock'n'roll its swagger. For once, Smith's utter inscrutability comes off as more charming than threatening, and he sounds like he's having a grand old time getting cheesed off at the world throughout the record. Check his "you're always a work in progress" taunt on "Ya Wanner", which sounds almost playfully directed at himself.
If the Fall make any mistakes on Fall Heads Roll, it's simply carrying on for too long. The end of the record feels disposable, with the partly acoustic "Early Days of Channel Fuhrer" providing variety but not much else, while "Breaking the Rules" bites the melody of "Walk Like a Man" for its synth part and essentially serves the same function as "Pacifying Joint", to lesser effect. Smith doesn't even seem to appear on closer "Trust in Me" (either that or he's pretending to be a bargain basement Thurston Moore), and as a result, the finale is anticlimactic. Still, overall the Fall remain, ever shockingly, in excellent form.
