Customer Reviews

Levitate

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This album is a wonderful melange of rock and various electronica - jungle, dub, ambient mixed in such a way that I can't say there's much comparable to it stylistically. True, a bit of it is simply because of MES's vocal style but they also match guitar or bass lines in parts of songs other rock-gone-electronic (or vice-versa) bands wouldn't dare. On the other hand the straight-up "I'm a Mummy" is nowhere near a throwaway... much more of a bizarre surf-music sci-fi parable that Frankie and Annette would get down to. It rocks. If you can find it, buy the double disc set which also includes a christmas-ish song with a line from "Deck The Halls" played through a megaphone. Wacky stuff.

First of all, if you don't know the Fall, you don't know Rock music. The Fall have well over 30 albums in print - they release an average of two a year, and they seldom repeat much in the way of material. Yes they are a recognizable style. Mark E. Smith's vocals are not much in the way of singing, in fact, he's been said to be tone deaf, but his word barrage is unique. This is not a soundtrack for your life, this is music that demands your attention and in its rather blasphemous way it can twist your thoughts. The Fall, have always smirked at high production, and opt usually for a very low tech sound quality. When you hear the fall, you really hear a band, not a studio overdub of what some producer hopes you'll buy. They have never sold out!

Read the reviews of 'Levitate', and an unsubtle pattern begins to emerge. Fall fans dig the new breed, yeah! Truly new sounds from a group I thought had done it all. Guitars are all but done away with on this record, which really brings out the gifted playing of Bassist Steve Hanley and Drummer Simon Wolstencroft. Groovy Bass lines abound from 'Spencer Must Die' to 'The Quartet of Doc Shanley'. I also love the extreme panic-inducing cutting of cuts like '4 1/2 Inch' and '10 Houses of Eve'. There is also the mysterious track 'Tragic Days', which sounds like a very vintage home recording of the first-ever Fall guitarist, Martin Bramah!?!
Not to mention my all-out favorite, the definitely NON-throwaway track 'I'm A Mummy'. This rocks like nobody's business, but in a really tipped way. It's a cover of an old Beatnik-Era tune, but it is a vast improvement over that simple novelty song. Tap Foot Or Check Pulse!

The Fall only get better with time, and this CD is great! This CD is sort of like the Sex Pistols breeding with the Chemical Brothers. Most electronic music lacks personality, but this CD gives it a unique voice...

This record came after the remarkable "Light User Syndrome", which has to qualify as a career highlight. The band moves further into processed sound here; their playing is chopped and pressed into unique form by a production team of young, ambitious engineers under the direction of Mark E. Smith.

The music varies and in fact the sound levels jump from track to track. The highlights are inimitable - the highly rhythmic processed drone-noise of "Hurricane Edward"; the prototypically Fall-like funk of "Masquerade"; the scarifying (is that a mellotron in there?) "Old Gang"; the horrifyingly brutal "4 1/2 Inch"; the minimalist jangle-pop of "Levitate"; the house music-meets fall-abstraction experiment of "10 Houses of Eve".

It doesn't all work, but the majority of it does and it sounds like nothing else contemporary. Three cheers for The Fall.

After 20 years of complaining, frontman Mark E. Smith still finds the enregy for a truly inspired performance. Unlike their previous effort The Light User Syndrome, a throwback to The Fall's straighforward rock style of the '80s, this one finds them tearing up new sonic terrain. Levitate combines rhythm section driven rock and off-kilter low-fi electronica. Smith, with renewed vigor, spews forth his always bitter and usually humorous mix of vocals and poetry. Tracks such as "4 1/2 inch" are so wonderfully paranoid and claustrophobic that you wonder if even the band knows where the song is going (This is a high compliment). The cover songs "I'm a Mummy" and Jungle Rock" are throwaways, but the rest of the album is a fine continuation of The Fall's destruction of old rock forms and exploration of the new.

Mark E. Smith knows how to cover a song. In fact, he does so on most Fall albums. Levitate features a couple of cover songs including the haunting "I'm a Mummy". I'd go so far as to say the rest of the material on this album is superfluous and pales like an uninvited geist next to this marvelous gem of a remake. Throwaway song? I think not! Wrap this version in gauze, put its guts in canopic jars, and treasure it forever. Buy the album for "I'm a Mummy" alone. The only thing that could make this album better would be if every song were "I'm a Mummy". For this lack for foresight, I'll have to dock the album a star.

I absolutely hated this cd when I first bought it. I even gave about ten listens before shilving it for a year just to make sure that I hated it as much as I thought. And then about a year later I threw it in just for the hell of it and heard it in an entirely different light. For some reason the overuse of pop synth no longer turned me off but seemed quite interesting. Ten Houses of Eve and Masquarade are outstanding and 4 1/2 Inch is a superb hard edged Fall tune. Levitate is a unique Fall record in that it sounds like no other largely due to the heavy synth sound but in a way that's what actually makes a pretty cool piece of music. Fortunately this wasn't my introduction to The Fall but it's definitely a great supplement to the collection if you're willing to give it some time to sink in. On top of that it's almost always available for the cheap if you buy used.