This Nation’s Saving Grace

Submitted by Richard Norbury on 28 June 2015 - 9:40pm

The panel had to pick an album from a randomly selected year: 1985

Cover:

Artist:

The Fall

album-ID:

a_172

Nationality:

Year:

1 985

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Mansion*Bombast*Barmy*What You Need*Spoilt Victorian Child*L.A.*Gut Of The Quantifier*My New House*Paintwork*I Am Damo Suzuki*To Nkroachment: Yarbles

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_66

Now-num:

2 015

Spotify-URL:

5naX4skWwnHntwMccG7Omn

Short-title:

thisNationsSaving

nominator-ID:

u_14

Meeting-date:

Thursday, 3 September 2015

MusicBrainz-URL:

e163ed54-842b-3114-9e98-a2d376029abd

Wikipedia-URL:

This_Nation's_Saving_Grace

Spotify-link-type:

album

Discogs-URL:

Fall-This-Nations-Saving-Grace/master/5241

Allmusic-URL:

this-nations-saving-grace-mw0000200218

BBC-URL:

4bq4

rdio-URL:

The_Fall/album/This_Nation’s_Saving_Grace/

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109

117

reviewers-IDs data

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-1-

-13-

82

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
69

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Spoilt rotten

4-6-8

3-5-9

I am without a shadow of doubt the world’s biggest Fall fan but, truth be told, I have struggled to get that much out of this one. I’m not that bothered about the big ol’ the twangy Brix guitar, and beyond that I’m not sure this is a band on top of their game, it feels like they are in some sort of transition. Earlier in their particular line of work, they had mastered a kind of chaotic, crap-pop sound, which I thought was great. And their electronic experiments on albums after this also brought me much pleasure. This period has more of a rock guitar drive, and on this one feels sometimes like they are figuring out how to integrate that into their constructions. It works really well on L.A, which has a touch of electronic backing, and My New House but otherwise I think the goth / rockabilly guitar sits uncomfortably with their purposefully rambling, dishevelled noise. I think the drums have become more direct, crude and rocky, which makes the songs more indigestible for me.

Various greatest hits / live packages don’t seem to pick out hardly anything from here, except LA, which doesn’t definitively prove anything but which, I like to feel, adds a bit of weight to the thrust of my argument – that this is perhaps not the finest of their many wonderful and frightening hours.
68

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

Markey Mark

2-6-8-9

4

As is typical with Fall albums (and I believe there have been a few) this album has a mixture of pure pop hits and rambling nonsense drivel. I tend to prefer the pure pop hits myself, although this album doesn't actually contain as many as some of their others. The rambling nonsense is fun and/or interesting for one or two listens, but I can do without it after further tries. Overall a good listenable album but far from their best.