Even by the Fall’s notoriously prolific standards, 2013 has been a busy year for whatever poor sod has to update the band’s discography on Wikipedia. The past few months have seen the release of a spirited if sloppy full-length, Re-Mit; at least two live albums (the latest of which is simply called Live, presumably because Mark E. Smith has run out of titles); and now, that relatively rare beast in the Fall canon, an EP of all new material. And despite the leftovers its title implies, The Remainderer is actually being touted by the band’s label as “a bridging point” between Re-Mit and yet another new album coming in 2014.
Of course, it’s strange to hear any Fall release described in relation to what’s come before and what will come after. The Fall don't so much logically evolve on an album-by-album basis as randomly mutate. Even in those rare periods of line-up consistency—as Smith has enjoyed with his current charges for the past five years—the sound, form, and quality of any particular Fall record seems to be a matter of pure happenstance, dependent on nothing so much as how many pints were swilled on the way to the studio, or if all the players involved had a proper breakfast. Of course, we all know that Mark E. Smith is the Fall, but the Fall is not just Mark E. Smith, and, as ever, their success is dependent on those magical moments when Smith’s free-ranging ramble serendipitously interlocks with his group’s wandering rhythms and pin-prick riffs.
More than anything, The Remainderer is an encouraging sign that stability has yet to ossify into stagnation with this ongoing iteration of the band, who formidably exercise their elasticity over the course of these six wildly divergent tracks. But we’re eased in on familiar footing, with an inviting title track that tumbles down the stairs like a cousin to “The Classical”, and thus feels very much like the sort of Fall song Pavement would’ve tried to rewrite in their Gary Young days; only Smith’s recently developed affinity for frog-throated, guttural grunts betrays it as a product of 2013. It’s a mode of vocaliziation that, for better or worse, Smith is dead-set on embracing in his golden years: “Amorator!” is less a song than a slurred, spoken-word spiel set to a droning, unwavering punkabilly skitter; “Touchy Pad” is a tortured, tuneless duet with keyboardist/wife Elena Poulou, despite its tasteful, acoustic-based arrangement. And though “Rememberance ‘R’” is hardly the first Fall song that wants to be “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, it actually gets more interesting once a wheezing Smith steps away from the mic, and has engineer Simon “Ding” Archer let loose with a rant about some unnamed reunited rock band’s sense of entitlement.
But when Smith actually takes the time to hork out whatever loogie is lodged in his esophagus, he’s in top form: the car-crash medley of “Say Mama/Race With the Devil” makes for a great, grease-stained companion to the Fall’s better known, more polished Gene Vincent cover, while “Mister Rode” boasts a classic Smithian see-saw chorus—“I got a name!/ I got a face!”—over a pleasingly meandering, bass-battered groove that builds into a surprisingly dramatic (by Fall standards) fuzzed-out finale. Ultimately, the only thing that really connects The Remainderer to Re-Mit is a similar, slightly above average hit-to-miss ratio, though the abbreviated format works to its advantage. At the very least, you now know what to get for the miserable bastard on your holiday shopping list.
