The Fall – Permanent Years (Paranoia Man In Cheap Sh*t Room) (2006)

I've finished catching up with recent purchases and feel I can listen to what I want for a bit, so I pulled this Fall compilation from the shelves and stuck it in the CD player.

I seem to remember picking this up in a sale in Canterbury's short lived Fopp outlet many moons ago, but not to listening to it much.

So, what do we have here? It's a compilation of tracks from 1990s albums The Infotainment Scam, Middle Class Revolt, live album The Twenty Seven Points and Cerebral Caustic, not the most easy period for the band, but it still shows there was a lot of good stuff happening there.

My highlights here (and you can look up for yourself which album they're from) are the opener Ladybird, the couple of non-hit singles Behind The Counter and Why Are People Grudgeful, the discobeat of City Dweller, the piano and synth driven grandeur of Service, and the raucous $500 Bottle Of Wine. I particularly enjoyed what I presume was MES's thoughs on Oasis, Noel's Chemical Effluence.

The non album tracks (although they had appeared on CD reissues) to try to tempt the completist are The Remixer, a remix of Shift Work's The Mixer, and Cab Driver, a big beat disco sound.

If you can ignore the two tracks of MES's spoken word from The Twenty-Seven Points (and I'd strongly recommend that you do) there's lots of fine stuff on here, with some excesses of the 1990s albums omitted, and certainly a decent purchase if you see it in a sale, to keep you happy until you can get all of the albums, which as the late John Peel pointed out, you must.

No link to the whole compilation, but here's Noel's Chemical Effluence for your enjoyment

4* - a solid and very enjoyable snippet from the mid-1990s.