Let me say it plain: Dragnet is the best Fall album. Not the tightest, not the slickest, not even the most consistent. But the best. The purest. The bloodiest fingerprint of Mark E. Smith’s cracked psyche smudged across a reel of magnetic tape, dragged down cobbled alleys and dunked in the stale brown ale of 1979 Manchester.
Where Hex Enduction Hour was the intellectual thesis and This Nation’s Saving Grace the accidental hit, Dragnet is the voodoo transmission—the sonic equivalent of receiving chain mail from a medieval detective who smells like sweat and bad Xerox ink.
Listen to the Opening
“Psykick Dancehall” doesn’t welcome you. It interrogates you. You’re in a moldy flat, surrounded by peeling posters and spider-legged guitars. Craig Scanlon’s scratchy riffs scurry like they’re afraid of the daylight, while Smith doesn’t sing so much as rattle—like a jammed drawer full of old receipts and amphetamines.
It’s all lo-fi, and not in the cute basement pop way. This is anti-fidelity. This is “recorded in a trench coat pocket” fidelity. Each drum hit sounds like a cupboard falling over in a cursed kitchen. And still—it swings.
Smith at His Most Fermented
Lyrically? This is pre-slogan, pre-shtick MES. No aphorisms yet. Just gibberish gospel:
“I danced myself out of the womb. Is it strange to dance so soon?”
That's Before I was born I walked the land in a stolen leather trenchcoat energy. That’s birth as performance art. Smith isn’t fronting a band—he’s conducting a séance in a condemned post office.
Dragnet is a Haunted House
Each track is a room:
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“Muzorewi’s Daughter” = Cold War psychic warfare in a karaoke bar.
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“Flat of Angles” = Found footage from a radio play about socks and surveillance.
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“Spectre Vs. Rector” = THE EXORCIST but done by a substitute teacher with a fuzz pedal.
Why It’s The Best
Because Dragnet captures the precise moment The Fall stopped being a “band” and became a language. It’s awkward, angry, deeply English, and totally cracked. The tape hiss is a character. The boredom is a weapon. Every song dares you to listen again, because it knows you won’t get it the first time. Or the fifteenth.
Dragnet is the junk drawer of the post-punk soul. And what’s a home without a junk drawer?
Final Score: 10 out of 10 bruised elbows.
Recommended Listening Environment: An unheated hallway, with a stolen pint, at the edge of a blackout.
File under: Anti-Music for Anti-Times. Or: The Fall at their fall-est.
Buzz out.
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