Fall Heads Roll preamble

I'm writing this as a preamble to a proper review, because the review will take me far too long, and I haven't posted for days ;-)

Firstly: I am what you'd call a die-hard Fall fan. I'm possibly not of the ilk that would buy recordings of Mark E. Smith breaking wind in the bath, but not all that far behind. In the past I've bought everything The Fall put out; I've trailed off a bit in recent years because I got fed up with paying out for thoroughly substandard live compilations, but still buy all the canonical albums and singles, and will still drive a fair distance to see them live.

All of which means it's actually very difficult for me to be objective about a Fall LP without judging it in its context next to all their other LPs. So bear in mind before you read these few comments, that I actually quite like Fall Heads Roll, and the harshness of my opinion of it is based entirely on the fact that it's a vastly inferior album in the Fall's canon. Nevertheless that still means it's head and shoulders above just about everything else.

But anyway, impressions based on a week's worth of listening:

• Lyrically, FHR is, without doubt, the weakest thing Mark E. Smith has ever produced. The straightforwardness of the lyrics fits the straightforwardness of the music, granted, but it's not what I want from a Fall album.
  
• Production-wise, it's also the most conventional. No scratchy mixes, or left-field stuff to destabilise the sound. It's a full-on garage-rock album.
  
• The band, bless them, are great - Spencer Birtwistle is definitely the best drummer Smith has ever employed, and Steve Trafford is a more than worthy successor to Steve Hanley. But Pritchard's guitar playing doesn't have that wonderful off-kilter approach that Craig Scanlon, and, to a much lesser extent, Julia Nagle had. So the overall texture is, well, a bit too rock for my liking. In fact it's a bit ROCK!! for my liking.
  
• It's far too bloody long. Some of the songs are pure filler - the "cover" of Walk Like A Man is dreadful, and should have been chopped. As should "Early Days of the Channel Fuehrer", which is a nice enough countryish waltz, but nothing really happens in it.

Anyway, this is just an initial summary - more later in excruciating detail.