Late To Reclaim

The Fall “Senior Twilight Stock Replacer” – If you’re listening to this song on headphones or decent speakers with a bit of separation between them, it will be hard not to notice something a bit perverse about this song: When Mark E. Smith enters the chant on the catchy, nonsensical chorus, it sounds absolutely terrible. Not his performance, mind you — he’s just being himself, albeit on the slurred and lazy side of the MES gray scale — but rather the actual recording, which is basically one of the worst overdubs I’ve ever heard on a proper, non-lo-fi album. It sounds as if Smith was singing along to the song on a boom box and kept unknowingly hitting the red record button on and off. And here’s the thing: It kinda works, in part because his voice is this distinctly menacing, intruding thing that clashes with the unity of the chant. It also succeeds because it’s bratty, and it comes across like a nasty afterthought, like “fuck you, I’ve made over thirty albums, and I’m putting in the overdub myself!” Smith is fantastic anti-hero; it’s not too hard to imagine him manhandling a console while some poor, bloodied engineer cowers in a corner. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)