Hullo there! Welcome to a designated cheerleader thingy over here on hey.com – it’s a bit more fancy than the old screenshots of an e-mail isn’t it?  Look! I can insert a picture of Mark E Smith:

Nice!

Look! Here’s a video of The Fall doing "Hark The Herald Angels Sing" – is it relevant to Shift-Work? No. No it is not, but it is the very best Christmas song and I can include it so here it is. Enjoy!

(I can't figure out how to embed a video in a Hey email, or even if it's possible, so here's the link. Please please please click through and listen to it, because it's absolutely brilliant. -- Kent)

I should mention at this point, that I’m not a proper The Fall fan. I know this, because I joined a The Fall fans Facebook group – I lasted about 2 weeks.  I have however listened to every The Fall album, in order, because a man on the internet made me, and no one else has DC’d The Fall in any of the other best album tournament, so I’ll have to do. There are 31 studio albums made by The Fall – they break down like this:

Brilliant 8

Very Good 15

Quite Good 7

Borderline unlistenable 1

Which a pretty amazing hit rate by anyone’s standard.

Shift-Work is one of the very good ones.

1991 finds The Fall in another line up change – we're 2 albums past from Brix Smith leaving the band/divorcing Mark E Smith and a guitarist and keyboard player got fired at some point before the album was finished. 

We start with some Fall advice which contains no advice. Moving quickly on, "Idiot Joy Showland" is a wonderful snipe at the burgeoning Madchester scene – not enough songs talk about kecks or tell those bands to show us yer cock imo. 

The Fall were expected to innovate, to do the unexpected – in "Edinburgh Man" they seem to do exactly that. A nice song about a city Mark E Smith had recently moved to, sincerely meant with no edge. 

The middle section of the album is classic The Fall – and the album was their highest charter – but the highlight of the album is "A Lot of Wind." Seems Mark E Smith turned the TV on one morning and found daytime TV Staple This Morning on. For anyone who dossed about the house not doing what they were supposed to in the 1990s (guilty!) This Morning was the TV show of choice. A sort of magazine program which occasionally covered adult topics on a phone in, had an agony aunt, cooking section, celebrity interviews and a weatherman who delivered the forecast on a floating map.

Mark E Smith describes the program much better than I can, but they did indeed talk a lot of wind.

The album finishes with "Rose," which Mark E Smith says isn’t about Brix Smith but probably is, and "Sinister Waltz" which is indeed a Sinister Waltz.

There’s a lot to like about Shift-Work – it’s another new beginning for a band that constantly changed, while still being very recognisably The Fall. If you’ve not listened to them before, and find their discography intimidating, it’s as good a place to start as any. I do hope you’ll give it a listen and vote for Shift-Work. 

– @megabrow12