Album Review: "Code Selfish," The Fall

Despite a couple of imaginative lyrics and a few interesting samples, Code Selfish never rises above a level of turgid dullness. Wallowing in a barren plateau of self abuse, THE FALL rarely manage to deliver an idea better than ordinary.

They sound tired, old, and empty. Mark E. Smith’s lethargic withered drones can only grate as each track unveils itself as more undistinguished slop. A poor man's VELVET UNDERGROUND for Time Enough at Last and an almost captivating exploration for opener Birmingham School of Business do little to save this sad show. Cheap drum sounds linger in a murky haze, and dull lazy guitar noises that a drunk on the underground could muster at the site of a coin abound.

This is one hard listen. Code Selfish is a collection of redundant ideas delivered in flat monotone sequences that never come to life. Move over boys, your time is up. You committed the biggest sin of all. You're a bore!

Grade D

Mike Harris

Riff Raff

April 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!