FALL, THE - Extricate LP

Highly recommended.

This is The Fall's twentieth LP, not counting the 77-Early Years-79 comp, the originally cassette format only Live In London 1980 and the two Japanese 1988/89 box sets.

Sandwiched between I Am Kurious Oranj and Shift-Work from 1991 - to be entered in a sec. 20 seconds in the band launches into this LOCK of a groove, not to ever let it go again. And so things get going.

Then "I'm Frank" starts and it's incredible. This is the slick, catchy and still nasty (and in their own way) very 90's The Fall. And "Bill Is Dead" turns the levels even further up (almost pop masterpiece here... for people who don't like Brit-pop). The liner notes state that "hopefully Extricate's simplicity will confound all bores, imitators and anxiety mongers".

And how much cooler than covering a Monks song can you get? They make it seem like the song was made for this outfit, not an unusual accomplishment for this band, in any of their many incarnations.

The 1967 The Searchers personal favourite "Popcorn Double Feature" ("The whole world's a funny farm-That man is your teacher-No need to be alarmed-NOT MUCH") is so perfect it's uncanny, it just keeps going.

"Telephone Thing", the first b-side song is just massively sounding bass line with all these (Marcia Schofield) percussion and keyboard things buzzing around the spiky guitar work of Craig Scanlon and Martin Bramah. And Simon Wolstencroft's drumming is exactly perfect.

If someone ever would have had the right to look up, get some pay back from the pop world, and actually got it, this would be it. Oh, and the first side is held-back/postponed material while the second side is (in their own words) NOW. And still is, 33 years after the fact. "She consigns them all to hell-She's the littlest rebel".