Review Summary: I like to relax with tobacco and sugar..
There are moments you peek Mark E. Smith and wonder how he managed to make it to 50. Leave aside the thousand stogs and thousand pints. He’s done drugs. And none like your local corner junkie who’s washed himself utterly out on blow cut to hell with baking soda and baby laxatives. A being made of gin runoff, pissed briefs and cigarette butts.
After its spastically incoherent opener,
Imperial Wax Solvent sprints, scrambles and struts through nine takes of giddily vile electro-punk. It rumbles and raves, and has more fire in its gut that most upstarts can cut nowadays. A slurred call to arms against both up-and-comers already maimed, and The Fall’s own peers who don’t have enough charisma to age ungracefully. It’s got more life to it than any elder basket-case has a right to muster.
Mind you, living to 50 is nothing to write home about in the civilized world. Hell, today hitting 50 primes you to start reinventing yourself. The post-post-modem 50-year old man runs marathons, does yoga, explores cooking with exotic ingredients and ventures into the creased parts of dating websites. He’s even thinking about sky-diving lessons or buying a small boat, and any number of other such hysterical outbursts against mortality.
Mark E. Smith’s 11-minute manifesto “50 Year Old Man” may well contain some latter-day existentialism, but in the most tangential, violent way possible. Like a man who fumbles through his front door, looks at his wife, then holds up a smoking cigarette and blears:
- How do you know this cigarette is even real?
And the wife takes the cigarette from his hand and stubs it out on his forehead:
- Feels pretty goddamn real, doesn’t it?
