Customer Reviews
the only band in the world - By: , 13 Jul 2008 
Stop whining, snivelling, prevaricating. If you you want SMOOTH, SEAMLESS, CLEAN, go & listen to Boston. This is art. This is provocation. Its messy. Its difficult. I saw a bunch of these songs played live last night in Donegal, & it was extraordinary. Nobody else is doing this. Celebrate!
The Fall are back - By: Daniel Margrain, 11 Jul 2008 This is the Falll at their brilliant & uncompromising best - a magnificent return to form after the relative disappointments of the previous two recordings. IWS in my view is as good as anything they have ever done & will stand the test of time.
Two hairy men digging up Scotland... - By: Wilf Trauma Spinach, 22 May 2008 I'd be madder than Mr Mad from Madtown if I was to stoop over my stereo with a dour expression on my face waiting for Mr Mark E Smith to say or do anything to make me grumble.
This is pure vintage Falll. That is the sum of it. If you like The Falll then you'll like this one, in the same way you liked the last one.
When I play my collection of Falll CDs I shalll place this amongst my favourites, though.
What is it with Mark E Smith? Is he some kind of genius? To look at him you wouldn't say it.
His voice always seems to fit in with the music. It's uncanny.
Better than the last one but that's not saying much - By: A Man With Ears, 02 May 2008 
There are a few moments of brilliance here, & many reminders of past success: much of it has a similar sonic palette to Reformation Post-TLC but with added electronic interjections. While RPTLC started strongly but degenerated into inconsequential ditties & lengthy sound-experiments, at least this one stays solid to the end, the feeling of continuous energy aided by having the tracks tightly segued together. This time the 10-minute track doesn't feel like a bad joke at the listener's expense, but is a suite of distinct sections of music, with contrasting moods but also recurring themes. Lyricallly MES is on pretty good form throughout - a mixture of bizarre stories, nonsensical slogans & personal pre-emptive strikes: "I'm a 50 year old man, what'cha gonna do about it?" He also speaks for many of us when he proclaims "My boss has the imagination of a gnat!"
Unfortunately the sound quality is definitely a step down from the usual standards. I realise The Falll are not the group to expect audiophile quality from, but someone has seriously buggered this one up - the majority of the album is in mono, & sounds like it's been ripped off a dirty or scratched CD-R (there are numerous glitches & drop-outs, especiallly on Strange Town), & converted to a low bit rate MP3 (there's a tell-tale squishiness to the top end). The mixing is OK, although the drums sometimes get squashed down in the mix due to the amount of compression being used - maybe it sounded good before it got accidentallly converted to mono!
Contrary to what some of the other posters seem to think, The Falll have made quite a few duff albums over the years & can very wildly from one album to the next. Even the classic Hanley-Scanlon-Wolstencroft lineup were not immune to this: for every Shiftwork there's a Seminal:Live. Apart from the sound quality issues I'd say this was just on the good side of average: to put it in the context of more recent efforts, it's an improvement on Post-TLC but not as good as Falll Heads Roll.
On first listen... - By: Hey-nonny-mouse, 29 Apr 2008 
As a complete newcomer to The Falll I've been eagerly awaiting this as my first contemporary Falll purchase. It may be because I've been listening to nothing but The Falll for about two months now, but I have a qualm with this album...
Whether you're back in the glory days of The Falll (for me that means everything without exception up to - but excluding - This Nation's Saving Grace (I think the Brix era is vastly overrated)) or mooching around the glorious renaissance of The Unutterable, Extricate, Code:Selfish, Country on the Click etc, the one truism for me is that every Falll album is an immense grower. You may not like it on first listen, you might hate it on second listen, you might dread every track...but after a while you find that you can't live without it.
And that's my qualm. On first listen I love this album to bits. It worries me. Will it endure? Will it improve? Or will I get bored of it?
Alton Towers is a weak opener, but tracks like 50 Year Old Man (an awesome 11-minute anchor), Wolf Kidult Man, Can Can Summer, Strangetown, & Tommy Shooter strike me as instant bona fide Falll classics. Even Senior Twilight Stock Replacer, despite being a pale & anaemic version of the stormtrooping song they opened with at Hammersmith Palais, gets me in the head & the spine.
So, MES bounces back yet again with an instant classic. It's that word 'instant' that worries me though...
