The Fall - 'Grotesque (After the Gramme)' (Cog Sinister)

This is a weird CD release because it pre-pends some early singles ('How I Wrote Elastic Man', 'Totally Wired' plus b-sides 'City Hobgoblins' and 'Putta Block'), but without anything in the liner notes indicating that. So 'Pay Your Rates' actually kicks in as track 5, and then Grotesque proper begins. Not a problem here - the singles complement the album perfectly - it's just that I only know what the song titles are thanks to my familiarity with the tracks (and the Gracenote CDDB database, of course). Repetition, cited often as an early Fall motif, is maybe most prominent here of any of these early releases - 'Pay Your Rates', 'New Face in Hell' and 'C n CS Mithering' (not to mention 'The NWRA'!) are insanely monotonous, drilling into one's brain with their back-and-forth soul-sucking. It's like a Michael Snow film, except with Smith's sneering lyrics providing a wild unraveling. 'English Scheme' has always been one of my favourite Fall songs, maybe due to the way that the carnivalesque keyboards blast over everything and the geographic evocations within the lyrics tweak my own fascination with British maps By this point, The Fall have evolved out of the punk thing entirely and arecreating something intangible but about their lives in Manchester. It's more confident, perhaps, less prone to hiding between Smith's bile. The keyboard and guitar interplay on 'New Face in Hell' is practically jazz. 

Birds of Delay - 'Gateway to Feather' (Alcoholic Narcolepsy)

This is an artifact from the explosion of underground UK noise-drone that peaked around 2006-2007. Birds of Delay are two guys that like feedback, and everything is recorded with the thick soupy drone + feedback layers that characterise their sound, at least at the time. 'Sandcastle Brain' opens it up with 15 minutes of monotony, to the point that the other track, 'Creamed Abandon', sounds lively by comparison. The latter applies bending and twisting tones to create a more psychedelic effect, though since everything (on both tracks) is breaking up through digital distortion, it feels very compressed. Music like this demands space, and there is space here but not much; you can't help but feel claustrophobic, even a bit frightened while listening to this. What this whole scene did is remove the trancelike/hypnotic elements from drone and leave the bad hangovers and nasty backlash. I'm trying to think if there's something distinctly British here, like the taste of a warmed Wetherspoon's pint or scampi fries, or if this might as well be from anywhere. I don't know what actualy would characterise US vs UK vs Korean drone, except that I can say Starving Weirdos sound nothing like this. I guess it's like a Jackson Pollock piece, where you can pick a sound and let your ear wander around on it, except it would be like looking at a Pollock painting in a really poorly lit room. I know that lo-fi is a choice and this aesthetic has its advantages. but you'd have to be deluded to think that a super quality recording wouldn't benefit these blokes. Or maybe you'd just realise how cheap their equipment is, because it sounds like it's all held together with gaffa tape.