I've decided to blog this album after saying I wouldn't until after I'd done the rest, there are some great songs on this, but it's still my least favourite as it is the soundtrack to a ballet and I imagine works better if you can see it with the performance, some of the tracks lack depth, which is a shame.
Song: Cab It Up!
Album: I am Kurious Oranj
Year: 1988
So yeah, this was one of the first songs written for this album, as I've said before, they opened a showcase gig at HMV in London with this song, when they were meant to be promoting the release of the same years' The Frenz Experiment, bloody awkward as usual.
It's quite repetitive, but not in a a usual way for the band, it feels to me like a lot of the songs on here are extended beyond their natural lifespans to create enough music for the soundtrack, remember they played live as Michael Clark and Company danced around them, so it needed to be of a decent length.
This song must be a contender for 'the title mentioned the most in song' in the Fall's canon and as you'll know there are some real doozies out there. That said, this one is likeable, the daft keyboard melody plinking all over the garage band sound the rest of the band are laying down sounds amazing and the drums sound excellent, there's some really complex fills curling out of the speakers here.
Mark is still employing his early and now often talked-about squeal here, giving the word 'uptown' some added clarity, but I'm loathe to say there's not much else to recommend this song.
Sorry Oranj fans, this one's a bit flat for me.
Aw, c'mon, this song is a BLAST. Wd mainly go to the Peel session version - itchy, rinky-dink drunk in the labyrinth of the city, faces appearing and disappearing out of nowhere.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps most of all it has that great Fall thing where completely dissonant, unintegrated instrumental lines, fracture, come together, in kaleidescopic variations, drops and rises in tempo, shot through with explosive releases of JUMPIN' JUMPIN' energy. And does he really say 'And when he comes, it's gotterdammerung'? Fantastic.
Also, gtfo, IAKO is a fantastic album - reformation history + science-fiction at its finest, such a strange glittering shimmering groovy sound to it all as well.
You're certainly enamoured with it, sadly it leaves me a bit cold and I maintain my stance on the album, it seems like a Fall-lite album to me, doesn't stand up to other albums either side of it for me.
ReplyDeleteThere is a live version with half of the original tempo: ace!
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