The Fall – Your Future Our Clutter (2010) [Domino] // Grade: A

Not everyone does this—in fact, so few musicians can: pound away for 30+ years without stumbling into some major misstep, a real run-of-the-mill idea, that renders them irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, The Fall’s storied past isn’t without hiccup—a couple of those releases are pretty bland, you know—but they’ve never done much to tarnish Mark E. Smith’s legend. He’s an anomaly. Untarnishable. Bratty, tenacious and fucking pissed off—those are the only real constants, aside from one of his wives turning up to play keyboards—but varied enough that even when The Fall goes under the radar, they’re not totally under the radar. Someone, somewhere, is completely in love with whichever weirdo sidetracked album so many others ignored.

This one? Not so ignorable. Another thing few musicians do: make one of their best records neck-deep in a career hinged on the brilliance of way early releases, and yet here we are—28 albums acquainted with Smith and what amounts to his ever-changing backing band, and this thing is, like, Rough Trade-era incredible. Your Future Our Clutter (or, as Smith speak-sings later, “Our clutter! Your future!”) is a steady chug of an album, wickedly exuberant, with creaky, clotted synths and the heaviest guitars. Oh, and Daft Punk samples. And biting little production jokes, like most of “Bury Pts 1-3″ being hazed out in a puddle of tape-dubbed, lo-fi noise. And “Mexico Wax Solvent” laying bare what really spawned The Pixies. And Smith’s cut-to-the-quick wit, and melodies like perfectly detuned accidents, and, and, and…everything. YFOC is the first recent Fall record to feel like the first Fall records: excited, anxious, desperate to expel the mania of fresh concept. It’s impossible to turn off for wistful reasons alone.

But don’t mistake it for a throwback—or, worse, a modern pandering. So much of YFOC is filtered through Smith’s distinctly now POV, from the crystal gorgeous production (which, combined with “Bury Pts 1-3″, feels like a comment on our current obsession with all things muddy) to wry lyrics about medicinal struggles and our latest me, me, me culture. Smith’s is a common disdain, but it’s always refreshed; not an old man rehashing the tactics that marked him as a genius in the first place but a strong and constant voice pushing forward to find language that matters this year. This month. This second. Talk about relevance.

- Rue Sauvage