The Fall - Grotesque (After the Gramme)
Man am I inevitably gonna take some serious **** for this review.
This album sucks. It is boring, dumb, features horrible vocals and very little instrumental variation. It offers absolutely nothing interesting for me. This would not even sniff my top 50 post-punk albums. For a while I thought I might be missing out by not listening to The Fall much, but this album has turned me away pretty hard.
"Pay Your Rates" starts things out okay enough musically I guess. The riff is pretty cool and the song fluctuates a bit, changing up its rhythms and ideas. There's very little else on the whole album that I could list as a positive. "English Scheme" is some dudes that only know two basic power chords on a guitar playing them over and over while unpleasant vocals chug along doing whatever. Maybe there's some great lyrics in here but I definitely don't care enough to dig deep and find out what he's singing about.
"New Face in Hell" is an insulting disaster. Again, two guitar chords. Over and over. They can't do anything else apparently. The squeaky vocals are unbelievably grating and downright horrendous, I cannot believe people enjoy listening to this. Oh good they had to add in a kazoo! That will really add to this song!...except wait no it doesn't this is still horrible. Often when I'm listening to a band that has awful vocals there will at least be some skill and talent in the instrumentation for me to appreciate, but this is so bland and soulless on the musical aspect that I'm just begging for the song to end. It is
so ****ing boring.
Thank goodness we have a 7.5 minute song up next so we can hear the exact same repetitive chords played for even longer than before. This song is so bad I can't even write more about it.
The album does not improve from there. "The Container Drivers" at least has some frenetic, fun drumming. I just don't care about any of this, though. This was easily the least enjoyable album I've done for this thread. I forced myself into a second listen just to make sure I wasn't missing something. Maybe there's some stuff by The Fall that's way better than this and I would enjoy it, but dear god there's so much post-punk out there that stomps this into the ground and I just really do not understand how anyone could even
jokingly call this "the greatest Rock album of all time". I'll take even the worst material of Joy Divison, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Wire, Public Image Ltd, Pere Ubu, The Raincoats, Echo and the Bunnymen, This Heat, The Pop Group over this craptastic album. I could even keep going.
Have a field day with this one, elphenor. From me this album is a
2/10.