Pitchfork

There's a 1987 interview with The Fall where everyone's favorite repellently preening pest and poet Mark E. Smith is asked to give his Ins and Outs. (A small sample: Ins - Ultra-flash black people, Asian pop groups, and James Cain; Outs - Scotch pop groups featuring pseudo-intellectuals, the Iraq war, and Eddie Murphy.) When read again 16 years later, the underlying moral is this: Mark E. Smith was always right, and always will be. His image is right. His politics are right. His precipitously craggy face is right. More fundamentally, his rampageous, begrudgingly musical wreckage is right. Lord knows his indignant, dragooning rigmarole is about as necessary to rock 'n' roll as Elvis and felonies. Sure, he's released enough mediocre-to-awful albums to sustain entire countries, but one gets the curious sense that at some point in the future (say 20 years), it'll turn out that Smith was right yet again, and we just weren't clever enough to acknowledge it.

This is probably a bit of a quandary for Smith. Oh, of course writhing masses of pinheads and blockheads still tirelessly berate The Fall (often with good reason), but, for the last decade, even the insults are now termed in the same way you insult Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Much to the chagrin of everyone involved, Smith has become the primordial prophet. He has nowhere left to go, nothing left to see. The faithful may still cling to decayed compilations in certain Yahoo! chatrooms, but there's nary a shred of anticipation to be found.

More bad news: The Real New Fall LP is as valuable an album as anything The Fall ever released in the 1990s, and Smith's vocals and lyrics have been reinvigorated since his work with the listless line-up on Are You Are Missing Winner. To get our parameters set, there are hardly any rockabilly brambles, trivial dub jumbles, or any other excursions into the myriad genres The Fall helped cultivate. But then, if you listen to The Fall for diversity, you're missing the point.

Like always, enjoyment of The Fall is directly proportional to one's tolerance of whatever sludge, flare-up or balderdash is repeated ad nauseum for a song's entirety. A reviewer's Aristotelian notions of what constitutes aesthetic truth are emptied in a blink of one of the yawping brutalities on this album. On "Theme from Sparta F.C.", Smith may shout, "I don't have a jack knife," but clearly no one told the guitars. Elsewhere, "Contraflow" slides shackled, trodden quagmires between verses. The riffs are barbed and boiled, flaunting menace, flouting melody, and about to topple off of Smith's face. Towards the end of "Last Commands of Xyralothep via M.E.S.", the guitars are at such an unbearable pitch that the production sounds like literally rocking the needle off its groove. Any subtle departures from the typical Fall sound are on the hushed folk-rock on "Janet, Johnny + James" or the deceased, out-of-key back-up vocals on "Mike's Love Xexagon".

Smith's lyrics are at a near career-best of insolence and nonsense. They're brilliant if you wrangle an understanding, and even more so if you can't. By the second song, he's already gone fishing, fled a pet cemetery, and successfully shoved anarchy onto the desk of a jingoistic Dolly Parton-Lord Byron alliance. On "The Past #2", he finally liquidates the concepts of time and truth themselves. There's an entire song committed to portraying Brian Wilson as a furtive despot and Mike Love as Christ, and on the Lee Hazlewood-written "Loop41 'Houston", he keeps inadvertently slurring "Houston" into "sedition."

It's their best album since 1996's Light User Syndrome, which may seem like faint praise until we recall that The Fall have released enough records to bankrupt entire record store chains. (It's also notable because 2000's The Unutterable was perilously close to greatness as well.) The Fall have been defrosted yet again, and there should be rejoicing in the streets. They're as brittle, volatile and consistently riveting as any band out there, and even though no one could possibly take Smith seriously anymore, it insinuates that there's still enough justification here to warrant following The Fall's devious discography into one more decade.