Despite Mark E. Smith’s fearsome reputation as rock's consummate contrarian crank and irascible iconoclast, the first two decades of the Fall’s evolution could more or less be charted alongside developments in British music at large. From the primitivist punk of their late-'70s releases, to the synth-powered pop of their chart-breaching mid-'80s output, to the baggy grooves of early '90s dancefloor infiltrators like "Telephone Thing" and "Free Range", the Fall weren’t so much an antidote to popular music as a funhouse-mirror distortion of it, with Smith’s anti-social snarl having a corrupting effect on jaunty honky-tonk shuffles, soccer-stadium-worthy sing-alongs, and the great British songbook. But by the mid-'90s—not coincidentally, the time when UK rock music turned slavishly retro—the Fall’s path diverged sharply from the mainstream forevermore. Since the turn of the millennium, they’ve been firmly lodged in their post-modern phase, reformulating their well-established inspirations—rockabilly, '60s garage, Beefheart, Krautrock, avant-garde noise—into a ceaseless stream of pastiche-packed albums that occasionally cohere, but mostly confound.
Technically speaking, Sub-Lingual Tablet is the Fall’s 31st album, but given their rudderless recent trajectory, it could just as easily be their 27th or 29th. That’s not so much a comment on the consistency of the current Fall lineup—which has remarkably remained in place for a record-breaking eight years now—as the fact that each new Fall album that’s surfaced over the past decade has represented a discrete, hermetically sealed unit, impervious to environmental or temporal influence. They've become a timeless band in the truest sense of the word, their records resembling both mysterious unearthed artifacts and garbled transmissions from an indeterminate future. On Sub-Lingual Tablet, even the customary pop-cultural references—always a reliable measure for carbon-dating a Fall record—feel oddly anachronistic, the album climaxing with back-to-back scuzz-punk screeds about Facebook ("Fibre Book Troll") and smartphone addiction ("Quit iPhone") that could’ve just as easily appeared on a Fall record back in 2008.
Ironically, the Fall’s most tight-knit lineup ever—now appended with a second drummer—has proven to be the most aesthetically malleable: on Sub-Lingual Tablet, they flit from space-age bachelor pad synth doodles ("Black Roof") to William Onyeabor-style West African hypno-groove ("Junger Cloth") to Stooges cover-band karaoke ("Stout Man", which is basically what "Cock In My Pocket" would sound like if Iggy got kicked in the nuts). But, in spite of their surprising stability, this iteration of the Fall is strangely lacking in audible camaraderie, and on Sub-Lingual Tablet, the distance between frontman and backing band feels more pronounced than ever. More often than not, the album comes off less like a product of intuitive interaction than the group churning out rehearsal-space warm-up exercises for Smith to spew over, shifting course and fading out at random. Strip away his loogie-gargling, melody-averse vocals from the lockstep dub-disco of "Dedication Not Medication", the squelching funk of "Pledge!", and the loose-limbed swing of "Snazzy", and the Fall effectively resemble the world’s most cantankerous jam band.
The Fall are nobody's idea of a pop band, but Smith has always understood the value of a big hook, something you can grab and swing on while the ground below crumbles. And though their legend has been built upon volatility and relentless non-conformism, the band produce their most vital work when they adhere to rock-song schematics while scribbling between the lines. Sub-Lingual Tablet opens with a corker in "Venice With the Girls" (yet another fine addition to the lineage of derisive Fall songs about leisure-class travellers), but, in typically perverse logic, the album’s most tightly wound song is also its most sprawling. Clocking in at 10 exhilarating minutes, "Auto Chip 2014-2016" not only boasts Sub-Lingual Tablet’s most quintessentially Fall-like chant, it finds the band, for once, casting out with a clear destination in sight, gradually applying pedal pressure on a sun-bound motorik rhythm until it achieves lift-off. "Sufferin’!" goes the song’s one-word earworm of a chorus—ironically, it’s the rare moment on Sub-Lingual Tablet when we’re not.
