Oh! The Fall John Peel Sessions box set! OH! you guys.

And I should be shot for not having bought this already.

it is here

i am scared

Just dive in would be my advice.

disc 1 is pretty close to being my favorite Fall "album." so kick-ass

No need to fear - unless it's overwhelming pleasure that you're afraid of! Also, keep in mind you may not like it all at first, but with repeated listens your favorites will shift. I especially love the few times they revisited older tracks and gave them something of a new spin (cf "The Man Whose Head Expanded").

i'm not THAT scared! i will start at the beginning.

open the box, open the box, open the God damn box

Go on. Liveblog every song :)

Futures And Pasts - such a clean, optimistic guitar tone! For about three seconds it's gonna be a blissful pop song, maybe female-sung, youthful and dynamic. Then a weirdly dinky keyboard and a chorus of yammering Smiths. It's still a blissful pop-song, mind. Just one whose youth and whose dynamic are slightly more oblique than you'd expect.

Mother-Sister - I love this! Great little tune. The chorus is a Fall special, the first moment thus far that MES really leaps out and begins to pulverise one's cerebral caus...cortex. Nicely sloppy tempo-change too. Darkness begins to permeate. Atonal shriek. This is fucking classic material. Atonal howl.

Rebellious Jukebox - Nice wonky bassline, absolutely no idea what the percussion's doing here but it sounds like it's being played under quicksand by morons. I mean that in the best possible sense. Descending vocal hook is the killer. Guitarist on verge of collapse, as he should be.

Industrial Estate - An exhortation, then a rave-up. These are the most 'punk' I've ever heard MES' vocals. Possibly deliberate. It doesn't suit him quite as much as his usual hectoring denouncement. Leaves promptly.

More when I'm not dying of tired.

New Puritan still sounds like the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard

The improvement in sound/performance between the late 80's/early 90's tracks and their album counterparts is huge. perfect example Chicago Now which sounds flat and a bit dull on the album but wonderful on the Peel Sessions,

the 'perverted by language' era session is maybe my favorite fall recording of all time

The improvement in sound/performance between the late 80's/early 90's tracks and their album counterparts is huge.

Agreed! In fact, it caused me to reevaluate the quality of their 90s work entirely, which I had previously dismissed. MES really knew which tracks were the best to highlight for Peelie.

Put Away - Crisper already than the first session. He sounds youthful and there is a dinky keyboard. Little in the way of darkness manifesting itself. A major-key hum seems to hang in the air. I find myself more drawn to the keyboard. This isn't prime Fall. Towards the end the guitar picks up and does a few noteworthy things. I don't think MES had full control at this point. I've finished my review and there's still a minute left. I predict...dinkiness.

Mess Of My - Like this already. Rowdy mash of bad chords. What we want. MES sounding a little more threatening. Entire song loping sideways. Slips into weird semi-gothic groove. Everything is better planned this time out. "I probably work for a record company!" He's really going here. Modestly righteous.

No Xmas For John Quays - A faster extension, this is some vicious party of a track. "You could say he was into nicotine and acid." Again the keys are doing what they should. MES screeches. "Why is it so?" Story unfolds. Christmas is a theme. This is some brutal holiday. Bass change-up in last 15 seconds is awesome!

Like To Blow - Evidently The Fall are still punk rock. Maybe they always have been. Keyboards still dinky. Better than Put Away because the guitars are doing dark, grimy things, and because the keyboard pulse is menacing rather than benign. And because it's a tiny bit after the beat, like a radar pulse.

I had a dream once that "Put Away" was a single for Jimmy Saville in the sixties, on the old Columbia label.

One listen to the lyrics would prove that this would have been awes.

Container Drivers - Band is clearly more confident. Step forward in drumming is especially noticeable. MES is more in control, both of the band and his delivery. He sounds like a merry torturer here. This is superb, the first time so far in the sessions that I've felt I'm falling with the band, into the vacuum-tunnel of MES' vision.

Jawbone & The Air-Rifle - Awesome, much better than the album-version. Vocals are clearer, and the lyrics, of course, stand out. Not that I can still make out more than about 50% of them. "ADVERTISEMENTS TURN INTO CARNIVORES!" OK, this final verse is like some high-point of lyric-writing. Great performance, need I add.

New Puritan - OK, now MES is the Priest. NOW he speaks and we quail. And oh that bassline. I'm turning this louder. "THIS I HAVE SEEN." Holy fuck this is possibly the most violently terrifying vocal performance I've heard from a British person. How old was he when he spoke these words? About my age, actually. Shout-outs to the guitars seem irrelevant but they're worthwhile. A keyboard pulse, ugly, develops into a spew. Guitars into a thicket. To have been in this band.

New Face In Hell - How do you follow up New Puritan? With an almost ornate, albeit still slightly dinky keyboard line! Major chords, happiness, a song that slyly undercuts (and yet justifies) its title. The band can still smile. And after you've been sucked into space and back, so can you. Smile, dammit. SMILE! Fine, keep quivering on the floor.

http://popup.lala.com/popup/432627062644029058

Middle Mass - Starts out even more promisingly than the last session! This is...unspeakably amazing. It's like the entrance music for Satan. It's like the song that invents Shellac, but with scarier and less precise production. It's frighteningly linear, and it is something that can barely be fought. It only chooses to have respite because MES knows the cruelty of respite. Go on, believe that those jaunty major chords towards the end are there to please. I dare you.

Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul - Keyboards are an alarm. Vocals are punk but by now MES has worked out his relationship to punk and so he doesn't sound like he's trying too hard, or doing anything other than what is natural. Is that a demented sax solo? NOTHING SURPRISES ME

Hip Priest - OK, now this I am stoked for, because the album version is one of the great documents of recorded sound. Drums are as mystical as they ought to be. MES' falsetto sounds sly and jokey in isolation, as if he's holding something behind his back. Lots of space in this recording and a nice hint of feedback. Feels a little more improvisational. It's going to erupt, I know. Drums are huge, and they're still lying in wait. Two guitar chords into the first explosion are perfect...then a BASS RUMBLE. Mostly unaccompanied. This band knows what it's fucking doing. This is so loose and experimental and gripping. It feels like the knight and Death playing chess in The Seventh Seal except with the knight as the guitar and Death as MES. And Bergman as the rhythm section. This is the moment I realise...that it is not going to erupt. It is erupting, constantly. It doesn't appear to be moving even until it's smothered you. Until the weird distorted mesh-on-mesh effect late in the sixth minute. By which point you are bound in the spider's web and being slowly poisoned. High-pitched screams which are plinks from the strangler. This is the antimatter to New Puritan's charging train. The charging void. The charging anti-train. No survivors.

C'n'C Hassle Schmuck - You follow Hip Priest up because you have to, and you follow it up with something similarly alien. Swirls into a different tempo without much warning, and the guitar, instead of exploring a colourful path to death or genius or whatever Hip Priest explores, remains in the same foul place. MES sounds like he's having fun, at least. They're a fun band. Gather, kiddies, and carouse.

Gonna take a well-earned break now.

Thanks for doing this! Its inspired me to pull out the box and finally load it on to my iPod!

They're all first-listens, so my feelings, usually those of astonishment, are fully genuine, and fully fresh. Sessions 3 and 4 are eerily similar in their
barnstorming-opener-followed-by-long-3rd-track-that-actually-threatens-to-damage-your-mind way.

I was thinking to myself "He's not going to be able to contain his "Hip Priest" review to three lines"

yup.

*relistens to New Puritan with headphones off this time, thus preventing death*

Oh ye 90s compare...
LP vers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJSCLVtnouo
Peel vers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Mx534urnw

Absolutely. And oh yes, that Peel version of Hip Priest is some inchoate primal brilliance.

Looking forward to the next session reviews, which is my favourite:

Session 5 - 26 August 1981 - produced by Dale Griffin
"Deer Park"
"Look, Know"
"Winter"
"Who Makes The Nazis?"

ask and ye shall receive

Deer Park - This time the keyboards are an oppressive layer of sheet-metal. MES is being satirical and snarky, I think. (You ask: when is he not? Well, especially so here.) The guitarist appears to have been given free license to play what he wants, as long as it's in that one chord. Bass plays the melody. Drums suddenly become more pounding in the last minute. Decent intro, I expect it to pick up now.

Look, Know - Again, the bass is prominent. So far this session hasn't been so much my thing, for some reason. "I don't give a shit what I look like" - ok, in the second verse this is picking up. Hahaha, BUM NOTE (seemingly) on bass into chorus! That's actually kicked the track into gear, like how Polonius' forgetting of his lines in Act Two Scene One of Hamlet launches the play properly. Yeah, the guitar squalls make sense now. And fuck there's a perfect li'l solo! Haha!

Winter - This has begun promisingly, like a slightly more straightforward Hip Priest. Love the buzzing noise that develops. "He looked like the victim of a pogrom!" Slyly this has become brilliant and there's another guitar solo, just a subtler one. Keyboards being deployed superbly. I've fallen in again. MES SINGS! "TAKE THIS MEDALLION!" Bass suddenly foregrounds, guitar goes off-kilter. Bass plays a FUNKY BREAKDOWN for NO REASON. God, I love this band. Bass then appears to go out of tune. Keyboard still makes surreal merry. This is approximately 5334714x better than the album version. Weird, heavy, ecstatic and slightly wrong. OH SHIT - buzzy keyboard solo in final movement just killed me. THE FALL KNOW BEAUTY. CRAP THE BASS AT THE END I DON'T EVEN

Who Makes The Nazis? - Hahahaha this is so badly-played, it's genius. It's like MES is playing the guitar himself! Maybe he is. Because there's another guitar now and it's playing the air-raid siren noise that music should make when The Fall are about to pounce on it. Need I mention the drums? "LONGHORN BREED." Now that guitar again on its own, joined after exactly the right number of bars by the drums. And then...what the fuck is happening in the right channel above my ear? What chaos? What hell?

Who Makes the Nazis with the plastic guitar is my favorite Peel track.

Next one up is my favourite Fall recording ...

Next one up is the one I'm looking forward to the most out of all of them. Am savouring the minutes before I stick it on.

I'm listening to the next session now, in anticipation.

Smile - Christ, the echo on the guitars! The slurred drums! MES lost in the vortex of musical fury arising from beneath him! You can barely distinguish the chords after a short time. Then the bass begins to explore. What I sense here is a terrifying pound, guitars as meat-cleavers. MES isn't shrieking or going catatonic, like on the album version. He's controlled, self-possessed, trying to keep it together as the roar intensifies. One-way ticket to the abyss, this one. No let-up.

Garden - Already one of the better Fall songs, here the very length indicates monstrosity. The guitar-line's been embellished with a major-chord, as if to throw me off the scent. Instead feels like some sort of Eastern incantation, like a Velvet Underground song that's found a proper drummer. No offence, Mo! Ha, I was kidding! No, I was! Honest. OK, the drum pulse during the first guitar breakdown...you can keep ya fancy NYC whackers, this is Rock Almighty, this is Lore. This is the fourth consecutive Peel Session with an elongated musical dissertation on precisely what makes music a force to be reckoned with, except there's two more after this one! Another breakdown, then a retreat. Briefly. Bass crushes home like justice. "JACOB'S LADDER - WAR ZONE!" This session is if anything even more composed than the previous ones. I say that, and "He's here! At last! He's here!" brings the panic. Then a weird snake effect. Then a broken organ. Then a Jew on a motorbike.

Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot - This is all minor-chord, all sadness. Glue pastes band to floor of recording room. Love how the chord changes for the chorus only once, stays at that chord until the energy is spent, and then returns to the initial pattern. Strange tooth-picking percussion. Guitar as church bell, tolling for the song it plays. Things go awry and the bass fades into view, distorted, like a surfacing Kraken. Song has mutated. Earth corrupts into fear. Guitar plays ballad for its own tortured strings, like plucked wire on a pig-farm. Call and response with evil of bass. Run. Run from this fucking song, but don't hide, it'll find you. After the religious contention of the previous track, this is the unbidden visitation of putrescence that we craved. And the guitar, finally, vomits at the sight of itself.

Eat Y'Self Fitter - One of my favourites, this was always the funniest and oddly one of the catchiest Fall songs. Here's to a romp! A fearsome, righteous romp! Oh god the response vocals are so quiet, hehehe! It's like MES is king and queen, and the VASSALS can cry from beneath the BATTLEMENTS. Need I add, the drums are insanely enormous. They dwarf even the guitar-line. Oh god those drums! Tribal primal horror excavation mechanism fury. The random blurts of noise accompanying "UP THE STAIRS MISTER" are a treat. Drums seem to stall, then power back in with more snare. They're all getting their cues slightly wrong and it's awesome. This is ineffable. Oh, is Mr Weird Organ trying to jump the party again? HE IS INVITED. Song impossibly becomes even more of a rave, just before the 'centimetre square' bit. Then rides roughshod over the carcass of YOUR EARS, DEAR LISTENER.

Glad you pointed out, inter alia, the slightly altered 'he's here! I saw him! I swear!' lines. I think the crucial addition is 'he's back!' For some reason this always produces a little nick extra of panic and fear.

Listening to the session version of Smile the other day as well and was struck how much the sounds seem to slide around compared to the album version. It feels stranger, loosed from structural bonds.

In case it wasn't clear, Hexen Definitive was my favourite. It's been a good run for third tracks.

Have we ever discussed which tracks beat their LP counterparts? That Youtube example above really shows how much more muscular and focused is the Peel version of "Ladybird". Not all of them are, though - the Peel version of "Hey Student" is disappointing.

even with the lyric changed to "As you masturbate to your Shawn Ryder face?"

I think there was a thread on the Peel sessions somewhere, but I'm not at my computer so I can't search.

Generally I'd say they're better, some much better - Squid Lord and Blindness to take two. I must admit I love the session Hey! Student - not least that wail at the end! tho the album version is great in its locomotive force as well.

OK, that's a week's rest.

Off you go again!

Yes, please.

no sleep for the wicked

Pat Trip Dispenser - Awesome mumbled backing vocals and off-key bassline in the chorus, and amazing post-chorus Marc Ribot-style guitar breakdown! Shit! And then it builds marvellously back into the verse. And you can hear Brix. This band is fucking on FIRE. It's as riveting as any of the openers so far. Guitar work is simply brilliant. MES rant 2/3 of way through is excellent. Oh god, this is the crazed POP MUSIC that The Fall hadn't really in all earnest made so far. I'm not exaggerating - this is WELL inside the top 10 of Peel Sessions songs I've heard so far. HAHA there's SUCH an awesome (piano?) drone over the last bit!! THIS IS FUCKING PHENOMENAL.

2x4 - Rockabilly! They play it well. Not quite the somersaulting blast of wrong-headed bizarreness that is the opener. Sometimes a repetitive bassline is transcendent for The Fall; not quite so here. Can't fault the performance. Gets better towards the end when the guitars and drums are allowed to explore a bit.

Words Of Expectation - You said it. 9 minutes long, 3rd track in the session, I'm expecting greatness. OK. A promising bass thunder. Distant radio recordings. MES phoned in from his own dingy basement. Crisp drums. Portentous, hanging, and enter MES for real. With one of the most righteous opening lines he's ever uttered. As the chattering goes on beneath. And the guitar chimes like a damaged thing and a female voice from a badly-manipulated tape rambles. Elements are gathering. It's a faintly major-key-tinged train into something horrendous, and we've only just begun. I don't need to say that it's gripping as all hell. It's also somehow completely different from all the other Peel Sessions monsters. Then, 4 minutes in, a sudden build, and the guitars become thumbtacks. Bass lurches. OMG THE KING CRIMSON LINE HAHAHAHAHA!! Don't think you've really got your Fripp on to be honest but nice image. MES has wrestled control of this song away from his bandmates, which is why I think it's not quite as good as the other long-form ones (maybe except Garden); he's the undisputed star, with his "HALIFAX...COPTER". It's not a double-helix dropping into some inferno. Until the 8-minute mark, which has thankfully just come and put the rest of the band into a spin-dryer. That's more like it. There IS something pretty hypnotic about the bassline; I'd say on balance it works nicely, although more as an MES vehicle than a Fall one. The best bit was the first half with the recorded voices.

C.R.E.E.P. - OK, if PTD was crazed pop music, this isn't even crazed. Energetic yes, but not imbued with terrifying gnostic vision. It's pretty catchy, I guess. 'Catchy' isn't ENOUGH, though! I want my Fall catchy AND fearsome! Or at least catchy and violently unorthodox. I'm griping unnecessarily; this really is quite the tune.

*listens to Pat Trip Dispenser again, because it was NEXT-LEVEL*