Are You Are Missing Winner

by

The Fall

Edit

You can't have too many Fall albums, but as they keep coming at you at such a phenomenal rate it is impossible for all but the most committed collector to keep up. Of course, the Fall have kept up a prolific rate since 1978. Line-ups seem to change daily but Mark E Smith remains always at the helm ("If it's me and your granny on bongos, it's The Fall"). 

This curiously misspelled album title dates from 2001 and mixes Smith's errant poetry and music with a handful of covers: from Gene Vincent, Iggy Pop and the slightly more obscure R Dean Taylor, a Motown writer and singer from Canada, who, perversely, The Fall have covered before (There's A Ghost In My House) to Leadbelly's Bourgeois Blues (renamed, and wrongly attributed to Robert Johnson), a song he recorded for the US Library of Congress archives in 1938 telling how he and his wife visited Washington DC in June 1937 and were turned away from hotels and restaurants because they were black. 

Sometimes the cuts and splices are as intrusive as a Jean-Luc Godard film, and probably as deliberate, and as ever, the result is an addictive and idiosyncratic assault on the senses. Is he having a laugh, though?