Having trouble viewing this? Visit the updates archive

Special Announcement
Make sure to visit the homepage of Other Music’s Digital Store. In addition to the Von Sudenfed collaboration between Mark E. Smith and Mouse on Mars -- reviewed below and currently only available as a download, as the CD release has been pushed back two weeks -- we also have the excellent new album from British guitarist James Blackshaw, The Cloud of Unknowing, which comes with a bonus download track exclusive to Other Music!  There are also lots of other brand new releases from Ladybug Transistor, Montag, Bonde Do Role and Cinematic Orchestra, not to mention the recently acquired Alias catalog, which includes classic indie rock titles from Yo La Tengo, Archers of Loaf and American Music Club to name but a few. 
 

This Week's Featured Download

Von Sudenfed
Tromatic Reflexxions
Domino Recording Co.
$9.99
Listen & Buy

As everyone knows, save Mark E. Smith, the Fall is made up of a revolving cast of players handling second fiddle while Boss Smith takes the limelight. Not that he hasn’t had some talented musicians in the group, and I don’t just mean during the band’s salad days with Riley, Scanlon, Hanley, Brix and the rest -- even back then they came and went with dizzying frequency. But Smith is known to be harder on his band members than James Brown ever was (or at least more arbitrary), and he was famously quoted a few years back as saying: “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall.” So why exactly ISN’T Von Sudenfed The Fall? The group is clearly constructed around Smith’s acerbic, abusive rants and undeniable charisma, but rather than the latest crop of 22-year-olds holding up the backline, Von Sudenfed is filled out by none other than Mouse on Mars, the groundbreaking German electronic duo famous for their dark and bubbly instrumental grooves.

Jan St. Werner and Andy Toma craft meticulous, off-kilter electronica, a riot of rhythm and sound both undeniably joyful and irrefutably unsettling. Whose idea this unlikely collaboration was, I can’t say, but it has an uncertain logic to it, as Smith’s current “songwriting” technique of repeating seemingly random stream-of-consciousness rants against everything finds a welcome home in Mouse on Mars’ swinging, seething grooves. St. Werner and Toma have done a great job at creating a sonic palette with just enough movement and melody to buoy their frontman without overwhelming him, and Smith jumps in head first with a great batch of rants on nightclubs, chickens, a bunch of stuff I can’t understand, and a few interludes in German that I’m sure his bandmates can’t understand. If this WERE a Fall album, it would be one of their better ones of recent memory. And as a fan who has seen Mark E. Smith spend an entire show disassembling drum mics and kicking over amps in a seeming attempt to foil the audience’s chances of hearing his band at all, and has also seen Mouse on Mars flatly refuse to perform for a packed room of rabid heads until the P.A. was rebuilt from scratch because the stereo separation was not to their exacting standards, I can’t wait to see the tour!

-Josh Madell