The Fall – Seminal Live

Beggar’s Arkive

If a clod be washed away by the sea / Europe is the less / […] Ask not for whom the reissue tolls [etc]. Do we infer that John Donne was talking about MES? Really that’s up to you. “Do we need Fall reissues” seems like the wrong question. We’re getting them and they’re going to be somewhere between glut and porcelain. Though it being the Fall you take the rough with the less rough. It’s a wheat from the chuff review.

Seminal Live may well have been a contractual obligation-type record in the first place, insofar as it’s half new studio tunes, half live versions of known stuff. But let’s not throw out the bathwater off the bat. One of the perennial frustrations / enchantments of the Fall is their approach to consistency. For my money, what lifts them above and beyond is that they were often keen to stick weird sound-art collage-y business over what might well be described as ‘poetry’ in amongst the more trad rockabilly numbers.

“H.O.W.” and “Mollusc In Tyrol” here are definitely in that realm — arguably more in common with your outright experimentalists like Faust than any band I’m aware of operating in 1980s UK. For whatever it’s worth, Smith’s lyric opacity is always a separating line from the raft of indie bands who toiled in partisan entertainments. And that line’s writ large here.

Mendacious too — “And alter tree-rings so that what you are after / You will not ever find with a surfeit of lumber / And make you imagine from hunger / Bread trees spinning, dripping with butter / Just six inches higher than your upstretched middle finger” [“H.O.W.”] is an agony of a verse, it’s be swirling around my head since I was a wain. Clipping the scansion and letting it out like a proper whipsman. It’s a given that Smith is a poet as much as a lyricist and trite as it is to say, he’s always worth paying attention to.

The live half of this is probably closer to the party time rockabilly business. You can hear the lads shouting along in the crowd at the end of “2 By 4”. But there’s equally the antagonistically badly recorded screech of “Elf Prefix”, prepending a good-enough recording of “LA”. By and large, the live half is alright, and in the context of Fall live releases, well-recorded and selected. That’s more a comment on the raft of absolute guff that typically constitutes Fall live albums. “Pay Your Rates” definitely sounds like the best band for bouncing too.

Yeah so yeah. The re-issue does what reissues do. I don’t know if the Fall are the band to get a slightly clearer re-issue by because a lot of this trades in murk and grubby tape sounds. Is it an essential part of a Fall catalogue? Yeah, because one of the most annoying properties of the band is that lots of their material is genuinely very good.

This isn’t quite a contractual one-off-the-wrist, but it’s a hair’s breath from it. There’s not much really to fault Seminal Live, but for the part-time Fall fan, it’s difficult to recommend on the basis of a few songs that aren’t elsewhere. But what else are you going to spend your money on? This is better than a load of crisps.

-Kev Nickells-