Sunday, March 30, 2008

Mark E Smith may look like some kind of nightmare combination of late (as in posthumous) Oliver Reed and E.T these days but the new one "Imperial Wax Solvent" sees the Marquis honing his phlegmy gargle to a quite spectacularly expectoratory degree of vituperative viscosity, adding a whole new level of disgruntled amusement to some pretty generic garage-by-numbers tracks toward the end. Luckily it's frontloaded with gems, containing the wonderfully acerbic, eleven minute tarnished chrome primitivist space rock of "Fifty year old man," sample lyric: "I'm a fifty year old man and I like it!" "Taurig" gets into some strangely sexy whispering New-Beat action, and a more err.... "Can"-like vibe enlivens "Can Can Summer" and "I've been duped," "White Line Fever" Motorik-ised with (I assume) his missus on vocals. It does kind of tail off after "Tommy Shooter" but frankly Mark's reached new heights of delriously funny free association with the title "Wolf Kidult Man," and it's good to have a more spacey, krauty, keyboardy, studio-exploiting Fall back.

MUCH better than "Reformation Post."
Hang on, am I agreeing with Blogglebumcage here? Again! Can't be right.......

1 comment:

owen hatherley said...

without wanting to sound like someone's gran, I like that this is one of the Fall LPs where you can hear the words.