The Frenz Experiment (Beggars Banquet)
by Nik Rainey
It’s twenty years after the would-be insurrection of punk rock, and it shows – most of the wild-eyed soldiers that made up its ranks are stooped shadows of their former selves, every last one of them a bunch of grumbling old men. Only one footman remains on the front lines – Mark E. Smith, the indefatigable, inscrutable frontman and ill conscience of The Fall, probably because he was a grumbling old man from the day he left the Manchester docks and, inspired by his Link Wray, Can, and Big Youth records, decided to give this rock ‘n’ roll thing a bash. And so it has been, through a collector-smothering outlay of releases and more lineup changes than a South End station house on St. Patrick’s Day, and so, it seems, it ever shall be. Without a single hiatus in two decades, Smith and whatever group of sidepeople he can tolerate that week have held fast to the dictum presented on their first, statement-of-purpose single in December ’77: “Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it.” A Fall record is a formulaic thing, which is not as damning as it sounds – they simply have the right formula: a simple, inspired guitar riff repeated indefinitely over a raw, circular rhythm, varying degrees of weird sounds over the top, and somewhere in between, the tone-deaf locution of Mark Smith ranting on about something. What it is, you can’t quite be sure (even if you have the lyrics written out in front of you), but somehow, it’s dead-on right. The very definition of a cult band – apart from sporadic charges up the British pop charts and the very occasional US radio semi-hemi-demi-hit, The Fall remain a taste palatable to a vociferous few – but their influence looms large over modern music, and their resilience and creative consistency are truly astounding given the constant upheavals running throughout their long and bumpy existence.
The period covered in Beggars Banquet’s current six-disc reissue campaign. Out of the darkness and into the lightweight, The Frenz Experiment (1988) draws The Fall closer to the prevailing winds of late-’80s Britpop, smoothing out some of their idiosyncrasies (and, not coincidentally, proving more successful in America than they had before or would since). With the twin-babe presence of Brix and new keyboardist Marcia Schofield adding a little much-needed (?) sex appeal, The Fall crafted one of the least challenging records of their career, which is not to say that it isn’t enjoyable. “Frenz” is like an extended, laid-back take on the pacing fade-in of their 1979 single “Various Times,” “Bremen Nacht Alternative” and “Hit the North part 1” are silly fun, and the covers of the Kinks’ “Victoria” and Holland/Dozier/Holland’s “There’s a Ghost in My House” are so nearly sincere they’re frightening. But the two oddball narratives that close each “side” – “Athlete Cured” (a tale of East German Olympic sabotage that not only rips off its central riff from Spinal Tap’s “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” of all places, but may have hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall so East and West could join together and try and puzzle out what the fuck he’s talking about) and “Oswald Defense Lawyer” (wherein Lee Harvey rises from the dead, acts as his own counsel, hugs the corpses of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, and gives an interview to Spin – or something like that) – prove that Mark E. Smith is still one strange, commercially untamable motherfucker.
