New Facts Emerge

If New Facts Emerge reminds the listener of any post-millennial Fall album, I'd have to go with 2003's The Real New Fall LP. [No. 145, p.55]

This one's a colorful addition to Smith's rambling canon. [Sep 2017, p.109]

New Facts Emerge could be said to be business as usual: ie, it cannot be quantified, and pulses with raw music, stimulating confusion and a certain monstrous glee. [Sep 2017, p.88]

He's louder and stranger than ever, growling his way through 11 songs that mix stomping glam rackets with lumbering. [Sep 2017, p.26]

Arguably the 2017 Fall is the purest version of the band there has ever been. This, you imagine, is what the inside of Smiths fogged head sounds like. Which is possibly why New Facts Emerge is one of the best things Smith has put his name too in a decade, the most complete and satisfyingly bonkers Fall album since 2008’s Imperial Wax Solvent.

New Facts Emerge is still rowdy and absorbing stuff, and proves that Mark E. Smith and his compatriots are growing old in a gloriously ungraceful fashion.

[A] restless, edgy album.

Theirs is a meaty, swollen approach to garage rock that leaves ample room for diversions into exploratory psych and shredded rockabilly, and these moments turn out to be the best on Emerge.

The best tracks (Fol De Rol, Gibbus Gibson, Groundsboy) flirt with disaster yet retain their discipline but, as is so often the case with the Fall, the music is less interesting than the song titles.

Despite their past volatility, these days the outfit have a relatively stable lineup--although scholars will note that Smith’s wife, keyboardist Elena Poulou, has now left. It doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on New Facts Emerge, however, which continues to plough a familiar, fractious furrow.

[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

“Brillo De Facto” prove vaguely purposeful efforts on the surface here, a second, third and fourth listen reveals a band seemingly bereft of inspiration, regurgitating tame Fallisms with--and it really pains your writer to say it--riffs conjuring every middling young rural pub rock band of the early Noughties.