Top 10 Albums by The Fall

Few discographies are as daunting for the beginner as that of English post-punk mavericks The Fall. Even at their most accessible, the band —essentially irascible frontman Mark E. Smith and anyone he can stand to be around/who can stand to be around him— are eternally abstruse; their albums all strange song-titles, abstract music, and self-sustained logic. They're not always easy listening, and there are lots of them to boot.

01
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'Live at the Witch Trials' (1979)

The Fall 'Live at the Witch Trials'
Step Forward

The Fall was formed by Smith, a Manchester dock clerk, in 1976. Influenced by legendary underground-rock freaks like Captain Beefheart, Can, and the Velvet Underground, the band were built on stoned repetition. But, where most repetitive, rhythmic acts favor a disciplined tightness, Smith has always courted chaos; and, on their debut album, they sound closer to falling apart than being hypnotically together. While the keyboards of Yvonne Powlett handle the melody, the guitars swing between dissonant and hellishly atonal, while the rhythm section remains forever half-collapsing.

Live at the Witch Trials isn't a live record, but, recorded in a day, it may as well be. It's a rough, prickly, nasty introduction to the world of The Fall.

02
of 10

'Slates' (1981)

The Fall 'Slates'
Rough Trade

By 1981, The Fall was a guitar band; making a noisy, distorted, vicious brand of post-punk that was both straight-forward —it rocked— and strange. Slates was dreamed as a kind of conceptual perversion; its six-song, 24-minute run-time landing it in a no-mans-land between EP and LP, ineligible to chart and seemingly not fit to win people's hearts. Few will discuss Slates as a classic Fall album because of its swiftness, but Slates is great. While the guitars fuzz out in a wailing wall of scratch, Smith is an astonishing poetic form; the lyrics to "Prole Art Threat" —a Joyce-esque character exercise in which various characters plot an overthrow of Thatcherite capitalism— are some of the most complex and bizarre ever committed to a rock song.

03
of 10

'Hex Enduction Hour' (1982)

The Fall 'Hex Enduction Hour'
Kamera

Conjecture reigns eternal when Fall fans debate their favorites, but, over time, there's been a slow-growing critical consensus anointing Hex Enduction Hour as their finest. The Fall's fifth album found the "two drummers era" line-up in prime, razor-sharp, ultra-tight form. One of Smith's defining ideals is his tendency to sabotage the band anytime things are going too well; true to such fashion; he thought that this was going to be the final ever Fall album. Three decades later, he's been proved comically wrong, but maybe it was this sense of imminent demise that makes Hex the definitive Fall LP: Smith straining for greatness; the band playing as one giant, heaving mass, hurtling desperately forward in hopes of keeping from falling apart.

04
of 10

'Perverted by Language' (1983)

The Fall 'Perverted by Language'
Rough Trade

A change was afoot on the seventh Fall album, Perverted by Language captures a band in the midst of a wondrous transition.

05
of 10

'The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall' (1984)

The Fall 'The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall'
The Fall 'The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall'. Beggars Banquet

The eighth Fall album comes divided: Side A is Frightening, Side B is Wonderful. The songwriting, too, is split two ways; Mark E. Smith, once a lone voice spitting on his lonesome, now splitting authorship duties with wife Brix. Brix's melodic sensibilities and fondness for structure ran counter to Mark's love of chaos, and this original odd couple came together to make beautiful music together. While the band's figurehead still sounds somewhere between bemused, furious, and drunk, and there is still an explosion of white-noise guitar, producer John Leckie otherwise marshals the newly-melodic Fall into radio-ready form, leading the title ringing half ironic. It's a wonderful album, sure, but The Fall were no longer frightening anyone.

06
of 10

'This Nation's Saving Grace' (1985)

The Fall 'This Nation's Saving Grace'
Beggars Banquet

If a Fall fanatic wants to argue that Hex Enduction Hour isn't the band's high-point, usually the conversation will turn to the one other record in their catalog that has unimpeachable classic status: This Nation's Saving Grace. A boisterous, rollicking mass of gnarled, tangled hooks, it's the band's brashest hour; Smith swaggering like a cocksure preacher over a band that sounds like they're reinventing rockabilly riffs by flaying the fretboards with fistsful of nails. At one point, Smith yelps "Bastard! Idiot! Feel the wrath of my bombast!" It may be the defining moment of his career; if not, it's a suitable epitaph for a band showing no signs of dying yet.

07
of 10

'The Frenz Experiment' (1988)

The Fall 'The Frenz Experiment'
Beggars Banquet

Many critics/fans tend to like The Fall at their most nasty and bombastic. The Frenz Experiment, the 11th Fall LP goes light on the Brix, and scant on the pop hits. Instead, it might be Smith's most sensitive, saddest work. The stripped down songs find the irascible barfly singing —actually singing— in a warm and weathered croon, over skeletal arrangements that foreground a strangely-soulful rhythm-section. The album also features The Fall's first-ever dabblings in electronic music, which they'd do a lot throughout the '90s.

08
of 10

'The Real New Fall LP (formerly Country on the Click)' (2003)

The Fall 'The Real New Fall LP'
Action

It'd been a long time since a Fall album grabbed listeners quite like the brazenly titled The Real New Fall LP. Where plenty of the '90s Fall albums —like 1997's drum, and bass dabbling Levitate— seemed happy with merely being funny/annoying, here Smith sounded like he hadn't in so many years: utterly unstoppable and righteously angry. The rage stemmed from the fact that he didn't like much of the playing and the final mixes on the mooted 24th Fall LP. So, he hijacked the project: rewriting, rerecording, and reworking things into a new version of Country on the Click uncompromising and, noticeably, angrier than the original version. And when Smith's pissed off, he's at his best.

09
of 10

'50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats' (2004)

The Fall '50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong'
Sanctuary

It feels cheating putting a singles compilation in a 'Best Albums' rundown, especially given that, for those weighing up a dive into The Fall's sprawling discography, it's the easiest place to start. But the amusingly-titled 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong collects a host of lost, scattered singles that, in many cases, are uncollected elsewhere. Sure, there are songs pulled from most of the LPs above —making this a well-measured sampling of a quarter of a century of The Fall— but there's also killer early cuts like "How I Wrote (Elastic Man)," "The Man Whose Head Expanded," and "Kicker Conspiracy" that you won't find elsewhere.

10
of 10

'The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004' (2005)

The Fall 'The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004'
Castle Music

Iconic British radio DJ John Peel was The Fall's most famous, most vocal, most persistent supporter. He called them "the band against which all others are judged." Peel invited Smith and co. to perform live —as part of his eternal Peel Sessions— so often that the complete collected recordings add up to a seven-hour, six-disc box-set. Perfectly symbolizing the Smith oeuvre, there's not a single double-up across the 97 songs; The Complete Peel Sessions span over 25 years of tightly-wound post-punk, dissonant guitars, and ad-hoc poetry. It's, in many ways, the perfect entry point for listeners heading into the world of The Fall; even if its hefty price-tag makes it an unlikely purchase for those not sure of what they're getting in for.