The Fall - A Past Gone Mad (2023)

The '90s were a dodgy period for Mark E. Smith and the Fall. Having sacked his ex-wife Brix Smith and the rest of his best-ever lineup as the '80s were coming to a close, Smith struggled through the decade hiring and firing bandmembers -- and in one well-publicized case in New York, landed in jail for beating one up on-stage -- and bouncing from label to label while making an increasingly spotty and disinterested set of albums and singles. (By the end of the decades, retrospectives of the '70s and '80s lineups were outpacing new releases, proof that something was askew in the land of the Fall.) However, A Past Gone Mad does prove that the Fall did manage to scrape up a fairly solid CD's worth of tunes in the '90s. Songs like the atypically poppy dance track "Touch Sensitive" and the ranting "Hey Student" may not be up to the level of classics like "Mere Pseud Mag Ed" and "Kicker Conspiracy," but they're certainly the best the Fall had to offer, and the disc is surprisingly free of filler. Not the place to start cold, then, but a nice summation of a less than stellar period in the Fall's history. © Stewart Mason