Code: Selfish

An underrated and hard-to-find Fall album, this 1992 release returned to a harder, more caustic band than found on the previous year's Shift Work. Slimmed down to a four- piece (with added keyboards by David Bush) and produced by Craig Leon and Simon Rogers, the Fall yet again returned with an experimental and menacing collection of songs. The centerpiece and only single off the album was "Free Range," a bit of Mark E. Smith's "prepsicognition" about the coming Balkan wars. "Pressure guilt! Grudge match!" Smith yelps, stringing together images and streams of consciousness. "It pays to talk to no-one!" Years later, it has the same chilling foresight of Yeats's "The Second Coming." Smith's writing was beginning to pare itself down to the essence, relying on repetition and imagery, while the backing of Scanlon, Wolstencroft, and Hanley were translating the feel of sequenced techno into their guitars and drum attack (especially on "Immortality" and "So Called Dangerous"). An album that improves with age. ~ Ted Mills