ART IN MACRO COMPLETE BUYER'S GUIDES #1: The Fall.

Skip to around two minutes into the above video and the case for the cultural significance of The Fall is made; that the tastemaker of tastemakers, the spiritual cool uncle of music, should name the group as his favourite ever. Also fans: Frank Skinner, David 'Bumble' Lloyd, the members of any half-decent US group of the last 30 years, etc.

We're not here to question The Fall's position in the critical canon. Let us assume they are as unimpeachable as Shakespeare, Keats, or Philip Schofield. We're also not here to teach you in detail about the tumult and the firings or even use the word 'curmudgeonly': other people have written books on those subjects. And while we're here, don't buy Mark E. Smith's "auto"-biography. It's one of the worst books ever ghosted.

The problem is: what to buy? No band can cough up thirty records (not mention endless compilations, bootlegs, sessions, and live albums) and not have a stinker amongst them and The Fall are no exception. We at AIM are industry leaders in objectivity and championing the consumer and are subsequently not afraid of any challenge. So here it is: every Fall record in 50 words.

LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS ****
Step Forward, 1979
Angry dock clerk Mark E. Smith adds the syllable '-uh' to every line. His drably-dressed friends make 'punk' music that only shares 20% of its DNA with punk (energy, attitude) but little else: they've heard Beefheart, some German stuff. Cheap keyboards, curious rants: soon to be left behind. Excellent though.
Key lyric: “We are The Fall. Northern white crap that talks back.”
Killer track: Two Steps Back

DRAGNET ****
Step Forward, 1979
Looser. Weirder. At times impenetrable. Blackly humoured, proud to be slack, notes flubbed left and right. The amateurish performances and mix sound fantastic though – a happy accident of anti-technique and confident direction. Dragnet marks the debut of key member Steve Hanley, whose bass often sounds like an industrial accident.
Key lyric: “I don't sing. I just shout. All on one note.”
Killer track: Before The Moon Falls

GROTESQUE (AFTER THE GRAMME) ****1/2
Rough Trade, 1980
Weirder still. They now throw their own warped take on rockabilly into the mix (which they call 'country and northern'. Get it?). Hard to describe in mortal words, so I'll try something pretentious – like Bosch re-imagined by LS Lowry. Images of terror and anger softened with humour. Best one yet.
Key lyric: “You think you've got it bad with thin ties, miserable songs synthesized, or circles with A in the middle. Make joke records, hang out with Gary Bushell.”
Killer track: Container Drivers

The Fall, Nijmegen, 1981: (l-r) Steve Hanley, Mark E. Smith, Karl Burns, Marc Riley.

SLATES *****
Rough Trade, 1981
Six-track mini-album/EP that has a reasonably solid claim to being the greatest achievement of all mankind. That is not an exaggeration. 'Slates, Slags, Etc.' takes The Stooges' template and improves upon it by not giving into rock & roll cliché. The three Rs in full, mesmerising effect: repetition, repetition, repetition.
Key lyric: “Academic male slags ream off names of books and bands. Kill cultural interest in our land.”
Killer track: Leave The Capitol

HEX ENDUCTION HOUR ****1/2
Kamera, 1982
Two drummers! Nerve-jangler 'Hip Priest' would find its way into the denouement of Silence of the Lambs at writer Thomas Harris' request. Loose. Some spaces dense with conventional chord changes and others stark and open and minimal. Generally considered their best by the beard-stroking contingent. On some days I agree.
Key lyric: “Made with the highest British attention to the wrong detail.”
Killer track: Fortress/Deer Park

ROOM TO LIVE ***1/2
Kamera, 1982
Unpolished and spontaneous, this record sounds like the run-time is all the time it took to commit this to its finished entity. That results in some brilliantly unforeseeable moments where instruments clash unexpectedly, creating new sounds. It also results in some slightly indulgent moments where 'spartan' and 'boring' are interchangeable terms.
Key lyric: “The sweetest sound she had ever heard was the whinging and crying due to the recession.”
Killer track: Solicitor In Studio

PERVERTED BY LANGUAGE ****
Rough Trade, 1983
The last of the two drummer records, sadly. Some definitive rants and some crucial stuff that almost grooves conventionally ('I Feel Voxish') are interspersed with slow, percussive tracks that routinely shatter the eight minute mark. A disciplined effort with no languers. Who is that female singer on 'Hotel Bloedel' though...?
Key lyric: “The best firms advertise the least.”
Killer track: Smile

THE WONDERFUL AND FRIGHTENING WORLD OF... ****
Beggars Banquet, 1984
So, Mark married an American (Brix) who plays a jangly Rickenbacker like Peter Buck. She must be in the band, decides Mark. A drummer goes missing and sunshine breaks the clouds over Salford. The first brushes with pop, whilst Steve Hanley keeps it dour at the low end. A palate cleanser.
Key lyric: “Used table leg to club son-in-law.”
Killer track: No Bulbs

THIS NATION'S SAVING GRACE *****
Beggars Banquet, 1985
THE starting point. Every idea works. Every track hurts. In a way, their least coherent record – the sum of thousands of influences. The pop of Brix, the grinding of the band, the playful experimentation of Mark...this should be every high school year seven set listening for one whole year.
Key lyric: “Was over accountant's and on business, then I woke up and I decided to recommence my diary. Then I read Paula Yates On Vision Mopeds. Then I found out we were not going to Italy. Later Mam said “Those continentals are little monkeys”.”
Killer track: My New House



BEND SINISTER ***1/2
Beggars Banquet, 1986
The first record without any real difficulties for the listener: this is a band that thrives on chaos! Instead: same line-up, same producer, same label. None of these songs would make the record before – no surprise - but age shows it to be no mere facsimile of a successful effort. Underrated.
Key lyric: “I really think this computer thing is getting out of hand.”
Killer track: Riddler!

THE FRENZ EXPERIMENT ***
Beggars Banquet, 1987
All over the place. The opening trio sound transplanted from 1981, before giving way to a diabetes-inducing version of The Kinks' 'Victoria'. Side two (vinyl fans) drags due to their first real stinkers, some clock the ten-minute mark. Nobody signed up for happiness: The Frenz Experiment reeks of it.
Key lyric: “Diluted Jesuits pour out of mutual walkmans - from Elland Road to Venice Pensions and down the Autobahns.”
Killer track: Frenz

Brix Smith, 1988

I AM KURIOUS ORANJ ****
Beggars Banquet, 1988
A huge curveball: a ballet score! Admittedly for maverick choreographer Michael Clark, this record besmirches ballet more than it does the band. There's a perverse sense of 'let's the see the bastard dance to THIS' running throughout, challenging the band to experiment for the first time in three years. Great!
Key lyric: “I was very let down with the budget. I was expecting a one million quid handout. I was very disappointed. It was the government's fault.”
Killer track: Bad News Girl

EXTRICATE ***1/2
Cog Sinister, 1990
Lead single 'Telephone Thing' isn't really The Fall: it's Mark singing over a Coldcut song. One song tenderly laments the divorce of wife Brix, the rest actively celebrates the divorce of wife Brix. Angular and tightly-wound, with two covers of pioneering garage-rockers The Monks. Another underrated effort; no real lows.
Key lyric: “Does the Home Secretary have barest faintest inkling of what's going down?”
Killer track: Bill Is Dead

SHIFT-WORK **
Phonogram, 1991
Arguably the most nondescript Fall LP: forgotten by all but die-hard fans. Transition from guitars to synths, a sense of the band trying to compete rather than just be. Moving Steve Hanley onto acoustic bass is like telling Mozart to try his hand at funk drumming. Effort? Yes! Reward? Little.
Key lyric: “California has Disneyland. And Blackpool has a Funland. And Flanders had No Man's Land. This place idiot show bands.”
Killer track: High Tension Line

CODE: SELFISH **1/2
Phonogram, 1992
I'm an ass for criticising Smith for bringing techno into the band's sound: they were always concerned with amphetamine-influence music, being a bit speedy themselves. 'Free Range'/'Everything Hurtz' was an essential double A-side single: the rest is a decent grab of garage and pop recorded in a watery '90s style.
Key lyric: “Your brain is software. Your brain is Game Boy. It's filled with excrement.”
Killer track: Everything Hurtz

THE INFOTAINMENT SCAN ***
Permanent, 1993
Popular! They've finally cracked the top ten on the crest of the Madchester house revival by throwing in some bouncy Korg-M1 piano sounds amongst the choppy guitars, grunting bass, and bizarre covers of songs by novelty artists and reggae stars. Personal theory: Animal Collective's 'Fireworks' develops this album's 'Light/Fireworks'.
Key lyric: “At my feet, one who laughs at anything. And at my head, one that laughs at nothing. And I'm just in-between.”
Killer track: Service

MIDDLE CLASS REVOLT ***
Permanent, 1994
The house direction made them popular. Being The Fall, they bring back the guitars and turn the synths way down. Mark sounds fairly restrained throughout an album full of angry content: class discomfit, anti-student resentment, and a cover of Cambridge alumni Henry Cow's 'War'. At times on autopilot, often inspired.
Key lyric: “Heinz is guilty on the borders of your imagination.”
Killer track: M5 #1

CEREBRAL CAUSTIC ***
Permanent, 1995
Earns three stars for sheer gumption: turning their back on the dance zeitgesit and sticking two fingers back up at the prevalent Britpop taking over their city and country by playing repetitive garage rock. Oh yeah – his ex-wife is back on guitar, slightly ruining some songs with her 'singing'.
Key lyric: “We have Richard and Judy's bastard offspring - baseball cap reversed.”
Killer track: One Day

Craig Scanlon played guitar in The Fall from 1979 to 1995.

THE LIGHT USER SYNDROME ****
Jet, 1996
The keyboards and samples are back, but this time they're being used less forcefully. Lots of space in the mix: tracks like 'Hostile' and 'Oxymoron' are monolithic creatures, approaching remorselessly. A word can be used that is not often used in the presence of Smith and his pirate band: subtle.
Key lyric: “Don't ever follow the path of being hard and tough when your heart is soft.”
Killer track: Hostile

LEVITATE ***
Artful, 1997
The closest the band got to an out-and-out dance album (not counting Smith's Von Sudenfed project). Slightly maddening production (by Smith himself) means some tracks have real bite, where others have a slightly watercolour feel to them. The songwriting is mostly encouraging, considering their impending implosion. Currently out of print.
Key lyric: “I thought about my debts. He was talking about his house in the Lake District.”
Killer track: The Quartet of Doc Shanley

THE MARSHALL SUITE ***
Artful, 1999
Big fight in New York in 1998: Smith gets jailed and the the band leaves – including Steve Hanley. Features 'Touch Sensitive' (remember the VW advert with the 'hey hey hey' song? That.). Surprisingly manages to be decent in spite of losing THE GREATEST BASSIST EVER. MES = a fool.
Key lyric: “And in dreams I stumble towards you. Knees knocked, as you evaporate. Though I am teed up, I am in the next room with you always.”
Killer track: Birthday Song

THE UNUTTERABLE ***1/2
Eagle, 2000
In a word: frontloaded. The first nine tracks represents their strongest start to an album since 1985! The final six never do much, including a turgid pub-rocker that Smith doesn't even bother to sing. Smith's newest girlfriend is in the band: her keyboard sounds are all six years too late.
Key lyric: “I was in the realm of the essence of Tong.”
Killer track: Two Librans

ARE YOU ARE MISSING WINNER *1/2
Cog Sinister / Voiceprint, 2001
American fight #2 and now Smith's girlfriend is out of his life: so are the rest of the band. The new guys sound like they've had two days with no electricity to learn a sixties garage album. It shows, but without the charming amateurism. Hyper-indulgent, mostly nonsense. Best track: a cover.
Key lyric: “The editor bedraggled, stumbled, some hurt, some days with film crew.”
Killer track: Gotta See Jane

THE REAL NEW FALL LP (FORMERLY COUNTRY ON THE CLICK) ****1/2
Action, 2003
All killer, no filler. Where they pulled this one from after years of diminishing returns is beyond comprehension. Another new girlfriend (later to be wife) is on keyboards and she's really good! Feels like a sequel to This Nation's Saving Grace: accessible, but obviously made by a complete original. Exquisite.
Key lyric: “So I went fishing. A note from a fish said: 'Dear dope, if you wanna catch us you need a rod and a line. Signed the fish.'”
Killer track: Janet, Johnny + James.

Eleni Smith (née Poulou): keys since 2002

FALL HEADS ROLL **1/2
Slogan, 2005
Perhaps that low mark is related to the fact that I paid £16 to buy it and hated it. Subsequent re-appraisal: too many two- and three- chord 'rockers'. Mark seems to think the band were once a conventional garage band: they were always too weird for that. Beauty found within.
Key lyric: “People in Great Britain, please don't get me wrong.”
Killer track: Midnight In Aspen

REFORMATION POST TLC **
Slogan, 2007
ANOTHER fight in America: band leaves. Seriously Mark, just don't go! You always mess up! His support act learned the songs and then he flew them to sunny Stockport to record this. A genuinely unremarkable effort, if anything: still not convinced about the Fall = garage-pop thing. Strangely lauded elsewhere.
Key lyric: “I've seen POWs less hysterical than you.”
Killer track: Fall Sound

IMPERIAL WAX SOLVENT ***
Castle, 2008
STILL going with the garage-pop thing, though at least there are some firsts: the opening track flirts with jazz. The new Mrs. Smith continues her strong showing behind the keys, displaying at worst an up-to-date knowledge and at best, pushing some sloppier tracks into the thumbs-up zone! A good find.
Key lyric: “The spawn of J. "Loaded" Brown and L. Laverne: with the dept. of no name.”
Killer track: Alton Towers

YOUR FUTURE OUR CLUTTER ***1/2
Domino, 2010
Their dullest rhythm section to date. They sound like two blokes at jam night. Fortunately, Mark, Eleni, and the new guitarist are all in sparkling form. New guy plays like Duane Denison, all bent notes and menace. Though he drops back to please the boss, he secretly steals the show.
Key lyric: “She has lips like Fedde Le Grand.”
Killer track: Chino

BONUS MATERIAL

Action Beat: "Playing on Christmas Day was the greatest idea we've had."

This post was written for Varsity online, one of the Cambridge student papers.

"On Christmas Day 2005, James and I hired a generator and drove my car around Milton Keynes playing in 4 different spots for over 2 hours. We started at an underpass near a built-up residential area. It was pitch black as all the lights were either smashed out or not functioning. We created an insane racket, with two guitars and a drum machine. People were coming out of their houses to check out the noise that was bellowing out of the underpass. We then moved on to an industrial area, which was a little more isolated and played for about an hour, and during this time a shitload of our friends had come out and were up for following us around to different spots. The next 'show', as it were, was one of my favourite shows off all time, because we played on a walkway bridge, going over the old A5! We finished up at Milton Keynes' notorious skate park. Playing on Christmas Day was probably the greatest idea we ever had."

One of the truly great bands of the 21^st century are based within a 50-mile radius of where you, Cambridge student, are sitting right now. No. Not London. Head southwest out of the city on the A603, where it becomes the sleepy B1042 and the A507, depositing you west of the M1 in Bletchley.

Most of the year, you won't actually find Action Beat there. This is one of the hardest-working, hardest-touring, hardest-living ensembles of recent memory. They have toured constantly for half a decade (until The Bergen Incident, more later). That is no mean feat for the average band, but Action Beat have seven, eight, sometimes ten members crammed like sardines into their van with equipment and personal belongings. Your correspondent has been in bands that argue deathlessly during a trip to the shop in mid-rehearsal break. There's no comprehending how you'd survive with sanity intact after showerless, nutrition-free days of close proximity and ear-shredding volume, with weeks stretched ahead promising much of the same. People have killed for less.

And their music is no easy-listening joyride for today's young-and-swinging single. When Action Beat hit their stride, it sounds like a war being thrown down a staircase. Electric guitars are tortured and bent like sheet metal, multiple drumkits pound away in remorseless ecstasy, with a phalanx of baritone guitars, electric violins, basses, and assorted percussion creaking and shaking and crashing along in white-hot fury. They never practice. They never sound-check. But years of live performance, refined taste, and taking the road less-travelled has honed these skinny teenagers into veterans.



In addition to this, most band members perform in other bands and put on shows in their hometown. McLean has also managed to transform his hometown label, dedicated to documenting local Bletchley heroes such as Dawn Chorus, Madrid Axemen, and Riotmen (among others), into a legitimate business by re-issuing Glenn Branca's 1981 masterwork The Ascension on heavyweight white vinyl. It's a labour of love, funded by “some inheritance money, and wanted to put it to good use rather than waste it on more van repairs.”

It really shows: Robert Longo's artwork gets the forum it finally deserves, whilst the power of the record never fails to overwhelm. If you haven't heard it, the album has not only had a profound effect on myself and Don, but members of various ensembles you might know by the names of My Bloody Valentine, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sonic Youth.

These years of fun are not without caveats. Years of the DIY lifestyle and aesthetic are taking their toll. Band and label chief Don McLean is about to have a child. On his band's Myspace, he recently posted the kind of blog that only a very nice person would post after years of being repeatedly kicked in the pants. Here are some choice examples of things encountered in the name of sustaining art:

"Hostel with inadequate number of beds, and an old women sleeping in the corner of the room who was obviously freaked out and overwhelmed by the 9 men who just entered the room. Her knickers were drying on the radiator, so that smelt good too. As if an old woman wants to stay with 9 other guys?!?!"

"The promoters at Incubate festival in Tilburg put us up in a squat ran by 18 year olds. It was basically a building site, with no windows or doors. Place was fucking freezing, and the kids spat all over the floor we were sleeping on."

And then there's The Bergen Incident. Shortly after their driver received a €1000 fine for testing positive for THC in a urine sample in Germany, their van broke down in Bergen, Norway. Look at it on the map. It is possibly the worst city in Europe to break down in: miles from anywhere, but facing the UK, being taunted. Just before the tour they had spent £1700 on running repairs and maintenance on the wretched thing.

For six cold days they awaited news on their van before being told it was a write-off. People in the city arranged a benefit show for them, but Norway is a place where a drink costs the same as a black-market kidney in the UK. They eventually flew home, utterly dejected, at a cost of £1800 for the six stranded members, leaving many thousands of pounds worth of gear behind in the van. McLean wrote on Myspace:

"Action Beat is in about £9000 debt now. We don't make money on tour, because our van is constantly breaking. It's now a write-off. We don't make money from record sales, cause we're not that popular."

Action Beat are not a household name. Their music is not accessible to everybody. They often suffer ridiculous indignities in the name of getting to a show and playing it (not that they are demanding or mean or expect kingly riches. Full disclosure: I've cooked for these guys on tour and they're almost pathetically grateful for a place to sit down and eat for an hour in silence). When they do get to the show and play it, even if the place is packed and they sell a few records, it goes back into the tour and the band and the label. So why do it?

The current working theory is this: no earthly feeling can adequately replace when this goes right. Watch.



Fortunately, even though Action Beat are a noise-rock force to name-drop on three continents, their commitment to DIY principles means that a guy like Don McLean is only ever an email away.

"Touring was always something that I had to do, and the 'pleasant novelty' never wore off for us. I am addicted to it, as are most of the band. The more time we can spend on the road the better, even if our minds suffer. In 2010, I got married, and now have a kid on the way, so 2011 won't be as active for us. A lot of members in the band have moved out of their parents, and are paying quite high rent, and this is another obstacle. So, it is definitely going to be a lot harder for us to just leave the country for 10 weeks, but I'm sure we will eventually find the means to do it."

In fact, his email is full of illuminating stories that it would make no sense to cut bits out of.

"It was definitely easier for us to tour so frequently when we first started the band. We all lived at our parents' houses paying little or no rent, worked shitty jobs we were able to quit when we eventually went on tour - and it was generally a really great time for the band because of the lack of any responsibility, or reality. I would plan out these ridiculously long tours, we'd fill the van with 9 people, and all save quite a lot of money so that the van rental and petrol was covered, the tours would run smoothly when we all paid for it. I would always say, “hey, you're paying £250 to go around Europe for 6 weeks. It's a great holiday!”"

Broken down vans, old women, and drug tests aren't the only nightmares of the road. There are also rats.

"It was at a farm which was squatted by French anarchists. It was actually a last minute show, because we had a day off, and it was a very good gig. When we checked out the place to sleep, it was pretty nightmarish, in a sick, cold, dark, damp converted cellar. Most of the beds were wet with condensation and nearly all of them had droplets of shit spread all over. Whilst sleeping, you could hear the rats above you, under the floor boards of the farmhouse. Insane. We actually returned there last year, and were dreading the sleep. We talked about how they had probably fixed the place up a bit, as it was a planned gig...wishful thinking I guess. We were wrong. More rat shit. This time, we all slept in the van, or in the venue."

Despite the hardships, they are not fazed. Their Myspace blurts out the message: “booking a short European tour in April. 2-3 weeks.” With dates set in Belgium, Bristol, and Manchester already (during the Easter break I might add) as well as more to come coupled with the reduced opportunity to see them over the next few years, this is a band worth the trip. For all the hardships they've endured it's the least you can do. But don't feel sorry for them. They're free and living.

http://www.myspace.com/actionbeat/
http://www.fortissimorecords.co.uk/

WHEN I GET SATISFACTION, YOU WILL GET SADIST ACTION

Peter Sotos has a lot to answer for.

We'll feed you to every hungry bird
We'll feed you to every starving animal
And we'll let them eat fat till they're full
And will let them drink blood till they're drunk
As I tell you:
It's helping
While I tell you:
You're doing the right thing

Whitehouse, 'Cut Hands Has The Solution'
from Bird Seed, 2003

I have this urge to kill
I have this urge to kill any woman

Brainbombs, 'Urge To Kill'
from Urge To Kill, 1999

Punk, especially US underground punk of the '80s, eventually moved out of a postered room in the suburbs and found its way onto college campuses. For some, the white-hot nihilistic energy that fuelled the music dimmed with the wishy-washy peace'n'love, feminist, veg-left agenda. Hardcore was E-numbers and I hate my mom AND the military-industrial complex. Colleges were puritan salad with extra ethics.

All this togetherness and unity and melody was plaid-shirted longhair hell to Peter Sotos; it was the '70s all over again. Sotos responded with Pure: a 'zine exploring the role of the serial killer in society. A liberal conceit at the heart designed to test campus liberals; it explored how the media abuses the victims as much as the killer does, utilising the trash/low-literary aesthetics of hate mail, crime reports, pornographic fantasy – and importantly, first-person 'exploitations' of the acts of murder. It provoked the necessary reaction. Pure #2, the child pornography issue, went even farther: it landed Sotos in jail.



Big Black were among the first to take these ideas and channel them through new nihilistic forms (indeed, guitarist/vocalist Steve Albini and Sotos were friends around the Chicago scene): where punk had been fast and unruly but ultimately consonant, like stilted pop music – Big Black made oppressive, discordant, hellish music. Albini, like Sotos' tracts, would channel murderers (“She's wearing his bootprint on her forehead”) and assholes and losers. In a further act of provocation, Albini would name his next band Rapeman. Concerts would be regularly picketed, criticism levelled, the band broke up before Albini spent the remainder of the '80s & '90s producing huge sellers for PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Pixies, and Page & Plant.

For some, Sotos' influence ran deeper. Here was a writer delving into the last taboos, making lustmord more than a dusty academic concept; scratching out conventional lines of inquiry that combined a love of anti-comic situationist thought and a full cognisance of modern tragedy. He would join British power-electronics group Whitehouse, bringing a volatile neuro-linguistic programming edge to their already bracing music; tracks like 'Why You Never Became A Dancer' a small scale model of psychic confusion of the corruption of aging.



Though overwhelmingly powerful and so cloaked in black irony it is hard to see any real truth, Whitehouse, even when assaulting the senses with white-noise and yelled incantations about Gilles De Rais, maintain a moralist understanding of suffering. They're dissed by scholarly music writers such as David Toop and Simon Reynolds, who maintain a frumpy fusty indignation about their connection with Sotos - yet they maintain an air of defensibility in that William Bennett has had a 30-year career and maintains close relationships with so many liberal and un-extreme persons that he can't possibly be all bad; rather, the Hermann Nitsch of contemporary electronic music.

The same can't be said for Brainbombs. Sotos nicknamed Peter Sutcliffe 'The Streetcleaner': Brainbombs have a song called 'Street Cleaner'. The aforementioned lyrics were the lightest in tone that could be found. All of their lyrics allude to misogynistic brutal murders, mutilation, child sex, or a combination of these tropes. They even have a song called 'Fuckmurder'. It's genuinely troubling stuff: at what point do we say word is deed? Is it ever?

From Hudiksvall in Sweden, the general consensus is that Brainbombs – though serious musicians (if you can ignore their lyrics then they're some of the best garage/no wave musicians anywhere) – are a joke played on record collectors, liberals, feminists, political correctness junkies, and anyone square enough to be offended. The defence: if gruesome horror movies can show mutilation and death, which can be unambiguous, given the wrong editor, then why can't Brainbombs sing “I'm a sick fuck / I kill for pleasure / I'm gonna fuck you dead / Cheap fucking meat / Blood dripping from her cunt / Pus out of her mouth”? The cover to Burning Hell has a dead baby in a coffin on the cover. The broken English of the lyrics somehow make the sentiments appears more detached, more dangerous; more deranged. It is not easy going.



Even if the axe is to fall and we unilaterally decide as people that these things are wrong to say/write/think, then kudos to Sotos, Whitehouse, & Brainbombs (and latter-day writers such as Jim Goad and Adam Parfrey) for re-animating a passionate conversation about words once again. Between the lot of them, nobody has committed a crime of the type they continually reference in their art. But as many have accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner of being inspired by a climate of heightened rhetoric, does this logic not serve to say that the words of Sotos et. al. inspire a heightened passion about violent murder? That if one person is influenced, it was all a bad thing? Is it even possible to just kick back and enjoy Whitehouse and Brainbombs for their music?

Back soon with something lighter.

Michael Gira's God Complex

I wrote a couple of articles for the University paper/website. After a couple of meetings and unreturned emails and responses that were unforthcoming, I can only assume that they've gone cold on my articles or me - or are simply snowed under with work. Anyway, here is something I wrote about Swans and Xiu Xiu. The tone is more for unfamiliar readers, but I can't be bothered changing it.

Some people love a good lyric. They have them permanently inscribed on their bodies. They whisper them to loved ones in the dark of the night. They stand in for philosophical conceits, political persuasions, and often negotiate the complex space between real feeling and articulation. Me, I usually couldn't care less; it's often just arbitrary condensed syntax that really doesn't mean that much.

Occasionally, lines will snake around your heart, or somewhere a little more cerebral, to take hold. To wit:

“I work hard for everything I own. Everything I own chokes me when I'm asleep.”
“Out of your mind with whorishness, incredibly young, incredibly filthy.”
“Break into the children's hospital screaming 'don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with me!”
“Cut out the infection. Beat up the violator. Gag him, then screw him down.”
“The oil is black and it is thick. Sex is a void filled with plastic.”
“This is the worst vacation ever. I am going to cut open your head with a roofing shingle.”

No, they don't scream 'party' to me either. They're dark, concerned with the grotesque and the violent, attempting a frustrated, futile malediction against a clustering blackness. Against the backdrop of the radio and the overwhelming banality of UK indie's proud underachievers, these are simply words that stand out; be they good or bad.



In the back catalogues of their writers (respectively: Swans, Xiu Xiu, Xiu Xiu, Swans, Swans, Xiu Xiu) these are not necessarily the best, the most novel, or potent examples of their craft. Their words are repulsive because things are awful. This is the world we live in; not that Usher and his ilk Eurodancing their way to the club are not in the same world. It's just that while the world sees Justin Bieber performing 'Baby' inside to a rapt audience, Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart sees the barmaid molested in the back-room, the CCTV mysteriously malfunctioning for that day only, the music drowning out the cries. Tell me that it wouldn't happen. Tell me that it hasn't happened already.

In February, Xiu Xiu released their seventh LP, entitled Dear God, I Hate Myself. Fluttering, high drama vocalisms take centre stage against a shifting palette of cold synthesiser, unsympathetic mechanic percussion and abrasive string stabs. The tension is sometimes too much to take: Stewart's vocal tightrope-act balances every track in a state of unremitting drama, a house of cards awaiting the merest zephyr to break the tension. And it never comes. There is no catharsis.

September brought the twelfth LP by Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, an audience-funded effort to kick Michael Gira's long-running project back into gear after a decade-long absence. Gira, a singular entity in a world of indiscernibles, would take to the stage in the early '80s and order the back door be bolted and the lights turned off but for a single spotlight. The band would unleash unmitigated chaos, deafening bass thrums and atonal guitars that have more in common with the scrapyard than the stage. As their 1990 live album recalls, Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, just before a period of mellowing.



My Father... attempts a clever balancing act between the remorselessness of the visceral and physical Swans and some more overtly melodic, sweeping styles, mostly pulled off to great aplomb. Where Jamie Stewart is a histrionic tenor, Michael Gira is a grave and impassive baritone. If most artists were to announce that a key track on their upcoming record was a seven-minute mini-epic about their daughter, it'd be time to line-up the sick bags. The first four minutes of 'Inside Madeline' batter the listener so thoroughly that the rays of sunshine peeking through at its conclusion are easy to miss.

What is signicant here, then? That these are two albums deep into each band's career whose lyrics reveal their treacly-black auteurs to be fundamentally moralist flaneurs: maybe not Christian by self-identfication, but certainly by de facto action. Those lyrics up there: they're not for kicks or to try and play to the kind of sicko who'd get off on them. Swans and Xiu Xiu have spat naked nihilism in their audience's faces for years now and some of them still don't get it, much like semi-racist Little Englanders don't get Alf Garnett. Now they're spelling it out for us. They inhabit the same moral sphere as Justin Bieber and his exhortations to just 'love you, girl', even though against the banality of the radio, you wouldn't quite notice.

Records of the year: Sharpie Crows: Mass Grave/Golf Course

Firstly: Mass Grave/Golf Course is a phenomenal name for an album; conceptually, syntactically, juxtapositionally, comedically; it just works. It somewhat spoils the party when you understand that Mass Grave and Golf Course are the names of two separate EPs, but if you download one from their Bandcamp page, you get the other bundled in. Hence: Mass Grave/Golf Course. Besides, the artwork all but confirms it.



Cursory listens to older material show the Crows have made a leap into leftfield, swimming forcefully out of the shallows of vaguely garage-y post-punk and into a deeper ocean pitched in the weirdnesses of the San Francisco scene of the early '80s, some Texas art-trash, and perhaps the spirit of countrymen such as The Dead C and The Clean (if not their actual sound). This might sound tenuous and idiotic, but let me try this on paper: the accent and vague 'experimental' tendencies make Liars the first point of comparison, but they do not sound like Liars. However (and this is the big leap of faith) - it sounds like something Liars might attempt in a parallel universe, were they suburban rather than cosmopolitan.

When the band 'rock' they sound more than fine: you imagine that live, they would be completely unhinged. However, it is their slower, more expansive material that satisfies more completely: 'Communist Girls' is the sound of stumbling home, the air hitting the drunken in a burst of badly-directed anger, frustration and bullshit ("do you know what I did today? / I fucked a head of state today.") before arriving home and sobering regretfully. Better still is 'Country Music': airlocked, disembodied, and full of disquiet. "How can we make country music / when there's no country anymore?" they ask, sounding as if they genuinely want to know.



What the album signifies, more than its own excellence (which it absolutely is: consistently across 11 tracks) is the triumph of the democratised unsigned act. Everything is self-generated: the art, the recording, the image and thus retains 100% of its intended characteristics; the band as true auteur.* They'll probably never tour outside of their own continent, but at least we can hear them as quickly, freshly, and in context as their local fans can. The album costs about £2.30/$3.80US. Whether 'the Radiohead model' works for smaller bands is yet-to-be-proven, but at least they can compete musically.

*I know, this has happened for years - but now on microscopic budgets it sounds as good as records you buy in the shops that cost five or six figures to make, ordinarily.

4.48 Psychosis: ADC Theatre, Cambridge

Art In Macro is back with a minor redesign (a template) and some new content. Some of the old content has been axed too. Yes, because it was rubbish. There will be more frequent updates that are shorter as well as an approximately quarterly piece that threatens to stretch beneath the southern boundary of you screen

Today’s review is of the performance of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge. What immediately follows is a brief interpolation about why, in spite of minimal theatre-going experience, Art In Macro is reviewing plays. Skip the next bit text to get to the review.
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In sentient adult life I have been to fewer than a dozen plays. Why? I am exactly the sort of person who should go to the theatre. It plays to my respective enjoyment of acting, literature, immediacy, and art. So why is the sum total of my theatre-going experience as an undergraduate a performance of Waiting For Godot with Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper (David Neilson) as Lucky?

Primarily it is about expense. The days of subsidized troupes and theatres are disappearing. You have to be a particularly hardened and embattled soul if you are to regularly stump up £10+ to see something that you can’t own later, that might not be good, that could potentially offend and challenge your understanding of previously cherished text. At least the similarly-priced record and DVD have a repeatability clause built-in. And at least the large touring rock band allows the opportunity for the audience member to come alive, be semi-interactive, and to consume several flagons of draught.

There were never any regrets about those few times I did pay the requisite for a play. And whilst I don’t have the experience to fully separate what makes a production first-rate from one to hate, the weary cynicism of the post-modern/late-capitalist voracious culture-consumer with a mouthpiece (e.g. this blog) is a transposable mode. I am writing as a dilettante to speed my passage into understanding; trying to make sense of things I do not fully understand without recourse to textbooks, theoreticians, and naysayers. Anyway: on with the show.

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4.48 Psychosis – Cambridge ADC Theatre
23rd October 2010

Pitched somewhere between Beckett (formal abstraction, the decomposition of semantics, an almost percussive dialogue) and Plath (despair expressed through snakish – almost primal – monologuing, depression as anger) is 4.48 Psychosis. The director’s notes claim it is not ‘a play purely about depression’ but ‘a cry for love and human connection’. All very well and noble, but ultimately begging a question about why the protagonist (The Lover) hates everyone, including those who attempt to love her?

The Lover is depressed beyond tears, a tiger set loose to live with humans, occasionally benign and self-concerned but mostly filled with incomprehension and an inability to communicate terms which might assuage her. Nothing is ever good enough. The Partner tries anger, calmness, aping The Lover’s rhetorical devices, and just about everything he understands within his power but comes up short. The Doctor attempts to retain a professional impassivity, treating The Lover like a problem rather than a human. The Lover sees this as impersonal and dehumanizing, herself as vehicle for pharmaceutical neutralizing. The Doctor does care; when she takes off the professional mask to reveal herself, The Lover understands the necessity of the object/subject relationship, how social and professional boundaries cannot be transcended. It kills her.

The acting is good throughout. Hannah Wildsmith is perhaps too young, unravaged, and restrained to be The Lover, giving some of the angrier moments the same kind of forearm-to-forehead tendency of the period drama rather than the modernist nerve-jangler. Nonetheless, her smooth, clear-headed soliloquies highlight the patterns that repeat and fold in on themselves later, crushing her under her own rhetoric (appropriate, considering her fate). Archie Preston is similarly fine as The Partner, requiring the greatest range, attempting a light (“RSVP? ASAP?”) that contrasts jarringly with the near treacle-black of the denouement. Best of all, or at least the most convincing, is Nikki Moss as The Doctor. She is a blank page, phlegmatic in that way doctors have to be to preserve their own sanity (irony probably unintentional from Kane). Clipped and distant, yet her notes grant her omnipresence.

The direction is surefooted throughout, with minimal stage set-up to let the actors act and the words breathe. Sound and lights offer subtle tonal shifts; the overriding impression leaves you with no doubt that all concerned have extracted all they can from this play.

All said, it is the play itself that is the most problematic aspect of the production. Endless debate could be devoted to this topic, though to cut a long story short, it appears to valorize the plight of the depressed and somewhat elevate their status to nihilist-visionary. The Lover (difficult not to read as an allegory for Sarah Kane herself, in light of her suicide before this play reached the stage) laments pills and medication as curtailing the higher functions of her brain, when it is pretty clear to see that the higher functions of her brain are misfiring, her synapses prone to influencing angry, awkward bursts of dialogue that make living and supporting a person in that state totally fucking impossible to deal with. Of course, Kane attempts to pre-empt such readings, but these are the moments that feel the most forced.

Funny People and the rise of the insider film

There are films about love written and produced by some of the most loveless people you could ever hope to meet. There are films about death written by people who have never experienced it in the family or friends. There are films about racial tension written by some of the most privileged around. But when it comes to films which mock the pretensions and politics of entertainment industry insiders, I tend to believe those the most. You write what you know, and in some cases, this is all some people know.

One such film is Funny People, which depicts the life of struggling and successful people in and around Hollywood's comedy scene. This is not a bad film, so please do not read on if you are expecting a humorous panning. It is frequently funny (though notably not-so-much in the stand-up comedy scenes which deign to give the film some kind of authoritative voice) and contains a good half-dozen memorable characters engaging in a not-too-unrealistic series of events. If that isn't praise, I don't know what is.



What it absolutely is is a mess. A confused hurricane of ideas that don't all quite pay off. For instance: I like a lot of music, so when I have a band, there's not this idea of 'oh, we will sound like this or that'. We will begin as a style (let's say energetic post-punk) and then I will bring a song that sounds slow and sad and perhaps a little bit country. This may be a contributing factor toward none of my bands being successful and quite jarring. It doesn't all quite fit – but that's ok, because all I ever was was some dude in a bar. Judd Apatow was 41 with a lot of money at his disposal. There are moments in this work that are pure Curb Your Enthusiasm-style improv. That will sit next to a glossy hi-def/tightly-scripted scene of emotional outpouring. The cinematography is similarly disjointed, as is its observation of certain maxims such as the 30-degree rule, moral consistency of characters and their ability to flip between sincerity and joking.

Adam Sandler plays the version of himself his detractors hold true: a decent comic, inexplicably likeable, who has made a barrel of money playing the kook in increasingly inane and flimsy comedy films – who is now Sad and Alone (and dying). It's a believable premise. RZA, he of Wu-Tang fame, plays a man who works in a salad bar and is happy with it. It is not a believable premise. It is not a believable premise because it is OBVIOUSLY RZA and this film wants you to recognise this as much as it wants you to be familiar with Adam Sandler and his personal story. Somewhere in the middle is Jason Schwartzmann, who is believable as a smug, shallow bedder of the opposite sex, but is not believable as an actor of a desperately uncool sitcom, being the man in Hollywood who has landed on his feet the most times ever.

And as a brief aside, looking for a good female character? Well, there aren't any. There's a pretty lazy “fuck-this-chick omg-i-wanted-to-fuck-that-chick-how-could-YOU-fuck-that-chick-dude-hey-man-if-you-don't-fuck-this-chick-then-i'm-gonna” going on that is gross and weird and the more I think about it could bring the whole film down. Of the five women I can remember with speaking parts, two are 'starfuckers', one is Sarah Silverman (playing herself as comedy insider), and two are main characters – one that Schwartzmann & Rogen have the aforementioned 'dialogue' about, who fulfils the indie-film sex object du jour role well – and the girl that is the object of a tug of love between Sandler and a hilarious Eric Bana that the film can't decide whether she's dreadful and only in love with someone because of mitigating factor X – or whether she's The Woman We All Secretly Want. Ugh.

And maybe this confusion in characterisation is deliberate, a comment – but I can't see it – not when the film contains sage advice spoken by Eminem, playing a version of himself as sage giver of advice caught in the role of celebrity he never wanted. All these scenes do, with moments where we are intimate with some of the world's most recognisable people, whether they are 'real' or 'comic', is add weight to the film's status as 'insider'. That's why it contains so many men of status.



The classic touchstone for such movies would be Robert Altman's The Player, the king of insider movies, not only apes industry mores and dialogue, but pays homage to movies and directors of the past. But recent years have seen television and films that also attempt to show the inside world of 'the industry'; Entourage, Action, The Critic, The Larry Sanders Show, Moving Wallpaper, Boogie Nights, Lost in La Mancha, Man Bites Dog. A whole series of Seinfeld is given over to this; we can even stretch back farther to Dziga Vertov, Michael Powell, Hitchcock and Fellini. Even now, as I write, the episode of Glee quipped “you need to do a real investigation. I'm taking CSI-real.”

Which kind of throws contemporary television into a series of post-modern conundra – about the way that they are contained by and almost cannot exist without reference to the issues they comment on. Film is eating itself. We're not just talking simulacrum and versions of reality. We're talking about the future of art as a landscape whose entire series of reference points is simply other art.

That is exactly what Funny People is. Every scene does not simply stand for itself or its place in a narrative – but for its place outside the film as well, about its relationship to what you know about the actors and their lives, the conventions of plot, etc. And you might say “well, nothing new there, asshole – musicals are totally knowing and people just dance and know routines.” The inherent post-modernism of musical-theatrical performance at least serves to propel the plot. The post-modernism of Funny People serves to say 'Hey. We're being post-modern. We know what this is.” And it's kind of boring. And smug. And massively self-serving.



Fortunately there's enough of a film hanging out in close proximity to these instances (it's long enough) to make it worth a watch. And it's nowhere near as problematic for reality as The Hills – and it's pretty funny. But post-modern looks at the inside of things have sidelined music, movies and TV for long enough. It's time to get back to talking about things.