Day 73: Too long in the mitts.

I've done a quick list and it seems I still have around 300 studio songs to blog, amazing, the Fall never ends! Apparently there should be an album out this year as well.

Thanks to those who are still reading, means a lot, still enjoying it and I actually miss doing it if I miss a few days (as I am wont to do at the moment, between houses).

Anyway, today's is an unusual one (but aren't they all?) and should have been Thursday's song, so here we go.



Song: Muzorewi's Daughter
Album: Dragnet
Year: 1979

This one has a very eastern-tinged, picked out melody running through it, although it still sounds chaotic and unpolished as this album was, it still sounds different and a bit daring for this period of The Fall. It does slip into some more noisy, frenetic parts, but overall, quite sedate.

The main riff reminds me of the main riff from Hip Priest, the lilting, slow one, good stuff. The production is a bit clipped and brutalist, but that's the way we like it, nice and caustic. The lyrics seem to concern the title, a guy called Muzorewi's daughter, apparently being cooked in a pot, seemingly giving in to fate.

A quick bit of research throws up this information on who Muzorewi could have been: Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa (* 14. April 1925) in former Rhodesia), a Methodist bishop and nationalist leader, was prime minister of the short-lived coalition government in what was called Zimbabwe Rhodesia; he held office for only a few months in 1979.

So this chap was probably in the news around the time this was being written, again a marked piece of history slotted into the band's back catalogue, but I've no idea if his daughter was cooked in a pot, but I do know now that this guy stood against Robert Mugabe a few times, so maybe he wasn't a bad egg. He died a while ago, but was seen as an important political figure in Zimbabwe's turbulent past. What makes it less turbulent now, I've no idea.

The lyrics are quite repetitive, but are delivered with both intensity and humour, MES seems to be mixed quite high in the sound stakes, giving it a practice room/bootleg sound, reminiscent of later live albums like In A Hole and the like.

This is probably due to being recorded in three days, sometimes I wish bands would do this kind of thing more often, basically, get together, throw some songs together, ad lib a but and just get it down. Instead you have people poring over every snare strike, every whisp of feedback, every note out of place and autotuning the atmosphere out of things, even bands who previously sounded rough now compress everything down to a homogenous, digital pancake, which is a shame...