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All Music Guide Review:
Review by David Jeffries
Like the discographies of Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bob Marley, or Jimi Hendrix, the Fall's catalog is polluted with substandard live and studio outtake compilations released by labels that show little interest in quality control. But 2G+2 is authorized as an official Fall album by leader Mark E. Smith and is one of the first in quite awhile to get wide American distribution, although, typical of the Fall, it's not the best time for masses of non-believers to be checking in. 2G+2 is a good representation of the lack of direction for the band, now spinning its wheels as it awaits the next great foil for Smith in the tradition of Brix Smith, Marc Riley, or the recently departed Julia Nagle. The nine live tracks from a short U.S. tour -- pulled mostly from Smith's least interesting album in years, Are You Are Missing Winner -- suffers from poor recording and bad edits. Smith sounds more workmanlike than ever, jet-lagged rather than drunk, and his current three-piece backing unit adds little. Only the oldies "I Am Damo Suzuki" and "Pharmacist" get decent workouts; elsewhere, lyrics are forgotten and guitar solos are flubbed. "I Wake up in the City" is one of three new studio tracks and finally heats up the band's current garage rock sound to near Stooges level. Smith snarls and coughs over a killer riff, which appeared two songs earlier in the live "My Ex Classmate's Kids" to lesser effect. Better care has been taken by other compilers with some decent Fall collections. However, with the exception of the great "City," 2G+2 takes the group in a totally new direction: dull.
Mark Prindle Review:
2G+2 - Action 2002.
6 out of 10
ANOTHER live Fall CD. Has any band EVER flooded the market to the extreme (tacos) that these guys have been doing for the past seven years? If I were just now becoming a Fall fan, I'd INSTANTLY be turned off by all the extraneous product out there. It's the very reason I've given up on becoming a Hawkwind fan! It seems like every Hawkwind cd I run across is either a compilation, a collection of alternate versions or a live album. And, just like with The Fall, their stuff is on about 8 billion different labels.
But what am I complaining about - I love The Fall! Let's see who's in the band these days -- Looks like there's some "M.E. Smith" fellow on vocals now, that's nice. Hopefully he can do for The Fall what Gary Cherone did for Van Halen (helped them to finally reach their full potential as a GREAT rock and roll band!). Then there's some J. Watts person on bass, presumably hired by Smith in tribute to the classic Diesel album Watts In A Tank. The guitarist is one B. Pritchard. If we'd gone to elementary school together, he totally would have been right behind me whenever we had to line up in alphabetical order. Which would have been FINE with me. Believe me, I had my fill of that hyperactive prick Timothy Quick pretty early on! The Fall's drummer on this release is named S. Bertwistle. Can you imagine how hilarious today's society would be if his first name started with a "Q"? Or even better, if his full name was "John Enernieand Bertwistle?" It would be as if the Who's late (cocaine and whores) bass player was teaming up with two Sesame Street characters for the kind of project only previously feasible for such grandstanding celebs as Anne Murray and Mr. Hooper!
But what's the deal with these two other names? E. Blaney on guitar+vocal and B. Fanning on acc-guitar? Why are they only listed as "With:" instead of being full band members? Were they just people in the audience who walked up and started playing for a few minutes before retiring back into the crowd? Or were they once full band members who have been fired by MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) since this disc was recorded in November 2001? Which brings me to another sore point - it says here that this disc was recorded in 11/01 in L.A., New York and Seattle. Does that mean The Fall came to NYC in 2001 and nobody told me? That would be somewhat upsetting, even though the last time I saw them live, they put on the worst, most out-of-tune show possible without Glenn Danzig.
Getting to the topic at hand, this disc features eight live tracks and four studio tracks. The live ones include a fantastic new version of "The Joke" that DELETES the annoying counter-guitar line that's been bugging me for years, a few numbers from the last album, far too many covers ("F-Oldin' Money," "Bourgeois Town" AND "Mr. Pharmacist"), "Kick The Can" with no fast part and a COMPLETELY unexpected version of "I Am Damo Suzuki"!!!!???!?!?! The inclusion of such an old, avant-garde Fall track only cements the theory that I began formulating as I listened to the disc: that the rays were the result of something happening within the atom itself, a property I called radioactivity. I also began to feel that perhaps this latest band membership isn't going to take The Fall very far into the future. They're too simple, too plain, too rockabilly. Mark needs to surround himself with players that challenge him to take chances. Aside from "Ibis Afro-Man" - which everybody hates but I love - nothing on the last album or on this live CD even ATTEMPT to take chances. Are You Are Missing Winner got away with it because it was fun and had a few great little tunes here and there. But when you take a disc like this - where song after song after song is just like two basic notes or chords repeated for five minutes apiece, it's evident that Mr. Smith needs to reign in his love for rockabilly and get back to the weird stuff that made Levitate and even The Unutterable super, smart albums that you want to listen to over and over again. Granted, he's done this BEFORE. Both Cerebral Caustic and The Marshall Suite waddle around in rockabilly quite a bit too. And that's FINE, as one influence. But Mark E. Smith is not Gene Vincent or the Big Bopper and he's never GOING to be. So he'd might as well go back to being Damo Suzuki. Especially since he's much, MUCH more brilliant than Damo Suzuki anyway (at least when he tries to be).
As for the four studio tracks - "New Formation Sermon" is simple catchy fast rockabilly, with a strummy acoustic guitar, a distorted guitar playing three cute notes and a bass bouncin' around like a little kid on a pogo stick that he put Ben-Gay on because he saw his father put Ben-Gay on his legs before playing basketball and he thought that it would make the pogo stick jump higher too. Not brilliant, but certainly fun. "Enigrmmatic Dream" is a poem of some sort set to a bland slow dumb riff. "I Wake Up In City" is simply a different set of lyrics recited atop the music to the rockabilly "My Ex-Classmates' Kids" (a song that, incidentally, appears TWO FUCKING SONGS EARLIER ON THE DISC). And "Distilled Mug Art" is a good one - similar to that "Fiend With A Violin" ripoff that we all fell for hooklinensinker back in our younger days, with two acoustic chords ching-chugga-ching-chugga-chinging while a sci-fi sound effect and two (or is it THREE?) different Mark Smiths yell and recite above. So I suppose that's kind of avant-garde. Sure!
Speaking of numbers, I received a disc in the mail the other night at 4 AM: it was Animals by The Lot Six on Espo Records. Sounds like a young band, maybe fresh out of collegiate studies. The music is hard-edged rock that calls to mind a lot of other underground bands (Slint, Fugazi, Poster Children, Archers of Loaf, Thin White Rope) without sounding like a ripoff of any of them. They seem pretty talented musically, criss-crossing back and forth between post-punk (which doesn't mean anything, but no clearer term seems to be coming into my head), happy chord rock and even country/western (!) while always keeping an ear to the ground for interesting guitar interplay. These guitarists like to work together, but only if they get to play different things. That's interplay, some might tell you! Cooperation! Like a football team! Hence the name The Lot Six! Every member of this band used to play for the Atlanta Falcons! Look over there! It's Steve Bartkowski on electric triangle!
In conclusion, The Lot Six are from Allston, MA (home of Anal Cunt?), are named Dan, Julian, Will, Aaron and Dave, and recorded this CD in Maine. I like some of the CD, but I think college kids would like it more. I say that because I used to be a college kid and back then my mind was much more open to stuff like this -- the Grifters, Railroad Jerk, Red Red Meat -- now I'm 29 and my mind is sealed up tight against this kind of "not punk, not metal, not terribly melodic in the traditional pop sense" kind of guitar rock. Plus I really dislike a lot of the vocals. The one dude sounds like he's 13 and the other dude sounds like he's faking a lazy heroin drawl ('ya tuck mah play-ace'). At least I think it's two different guys. If it's just one, he is a master of voice disguise and should drop out of the band and go to Ventriloquist College before all their fall classes fill up. HURRY!
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