The Fall's eighth release, The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall, starts with a chant—"lay, lay, lay, lay"—as a troubling, distorted guitar line echoes beneath. In 1984, the Fall believed they were the future of rock music, and as Mark E. Smith intones the word "Armageddon" and "Lay of the Land" begins, everyone from your standard punk revivalist to Stephen Malkmus knows they were right.
The Fall were the definition of "before their time." When they started recording in 1979, punk was beginning to explore its boundaries and grow into the discordance of hardcore and new wave. The Fall saw past the faux intellectualism, and by Wonderful and Frightening they seemed like they were already recording in 2012. Listening to the record today, you can hear the past 20 years of artsy punk expressed in its most dynamic, compact form.
To say that the Fall's existence is tumultuous is an understatement—they've had at least 20 different members in almost 30 years of recording, including one of Smith's ex-wives and his current wife—but there has always been a line of similarity throughout all the records. Wonderful and Frightening contains flashes of all the best aspects of the Fall's huge repertoire: creepy (the aforementioned "Lay of the Land," "God-Box"); sort-of happy ("Draygo's Guilt," "C.R.E.E.P."); alternating yelling and spoken word ("Slang King"); and poppy accessible (pretty much every track after "C.R.E.E.P."). Even though there are so many different styles present, they are just points of divergence from a song standard—the drums will always be abrasive and there will be approximately 200,000 time changes per song. (What, you thought Thurston Moore invented gratuitous time changes? Sonic Youth are the original Fall rip-off band.)
Wonderful and Frightening is definitely the Fall's easiest record to absorb, especially for people who haven't already absorbed Liars' 2004 album, They Were Wrong So We Drowned, another crowning achievement in Fall imitation. Many of these songs are outright pop, albeit with growling vocals and the jangliest of all guitars.
Smith is not known for being a nice person and it shows in his lyrics. He's a rabid antigovernment alcoholic musician, and that's what he sings about. In the song "Elves," he literally spits into the microphone with disgust in the second minute of the song. He had just choked out the words, "Spitting on what's good and gone/When will the price of scotch come down?" Smith might be a poster boy for hatred and antipathy, but his words resonate to the bone, and the music is constructed to do the same.
