Hex Enduction Hour seems to be one of the two most popular Fall albums.
Which is your favourite track – and why?

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2G+2 / Are You Are Missing Winner / Bend Sinister / Cerebral Caustic / Code: Selfish / Dragnet / Extricate / Fall Heads Roll / The Frenz Experiment / Grotesque (After The Gramme) / Hex Enduction Hour / I Am Kurious Oranj / Imperial Wax Solvent / The Infotainment Scan / Interim / Levitate / The Light User Syndrome / Live At The Witch Trials / The Marshall Suite / Middle Class Revolt / Perverted By Language / The Post Nearly Man / The Real New Fall LP (Formerly ‘Country On The Click’) / Reformation Post-TLC / Room To Live / Seminal Live / Shift-Work / Slates / This Nation’s Saving Grace / Totale’s Turns / The Twenty-Seven Points / The Unutterable / The Wonderful & Frightening World Of The Fall / Von Südenfed's Tromatic Reflexxions

Stephen, you set this poll up wrong.... I wasn't able to click EVERY box. :rolleyes:

Genius album. Which song did I tick... can't remember now.

I find Jawbone... can get a bit tiresome. The rest is all splendid.

Mere Pseud Mag Ed is damn near perfect.. Tempo changes, fantastic chords, on-the-money lyrics.. a real peak. Never rated Hip Priest, apart from those four wicked guitar chords - although the Peel session version's good

The Classical is possibly my favourite Fall song... it's huge. Also love Jawbone... hip priest is above criticism... Winter... Iceland... blah blah blah

Never rated Hip Priest?
NEVER RATED HIP PRIEST???
(faints)

Well, I voted for The Classical, somewhat arbitrarily. I'd like to vote for every track as better than my favourite from Bend Sinister :P

I voted for Jawbone. What is there not to like?

aaargh!
I hit "The Classical" almost as a reflex action (THAT riff!), but now I think about it, it's probably "Iceland" one of their best "experimental" tracks....

and it's got that "Memorex for the Kraken" line- always loved that...

Gotta be 'Classical' VERY closely followed by Hip Priest.

Nazi's is cool too...

Fortress/Deer Park for me, very difficult choice, the whole album is brilliant.

I find it unbelievable that after 31 votes, Who Makes The Nazis? is more popular than Hip Priest...

the classical by a bit of a distance

Can’t believe so few of you have voted for ‘Winter’ (although it doesn’t help that its split into two parts)…

I have to admit that the Peel version is probably the definitive version (when MES sings ‘And sometimes, that little…’, he trails off and the keyboard plays that little riff, it just send shivers up my spine…)

'Winter' is MES as his most filmic, painting a picture with his words, when I listen to this I’m there …standing on some grim, freezing cold street, watching the mad kid in his green fuzz paper hat, tormenting his long suffering mother, threatening passers by with his dog…’I’ll take both of you on…’…genius.

Brilliance ends 5 minutes into And This Day, but its the album of a lifetime up to that point.

the 1st one...that is the best :)

iceland.... cos the atmosphere conjured on the track is just like the place....

THE CLASICAL


HEY THERE FUCK FACE
HEY THERE FUCK FACE

"the classical"...............brilliant!!!!!!!!!! :D

Does anyone else associate:

The Classical's "I've never felt better in my life..."

with

Bill Is Dead's "These are the best times of my life..."


And in each case is he being sarcastic/ironic or not?

Astonishing to me that after 51 votes so far, only 3 have gone to Hip Priest. I would say this is one of the 5 greatest ever Fall recordings.

the classical is indeed a damn fine song :D

I like it a lot but it wouldn't be in my top 20 Fall songs.
Why so popular?

Stephen--

my take was always The Classical was being blackly ironic and Bill is Dead was being serious. Although I read that Bill is Dead was written at a low point in MES's life, but in the context of the song, I don't see any sarcasm.


I voted for Iceland, on any other day I could have voted for The Classical or Winter.

I sent my friend an MP3 of Hip Priest about a year ago, just on a whim. He mostly listens to nu-metal and hip hop, we have very differing tastes in music for the most part. Just the other day he messages me saying he's listened to Hip Priest at lesat 500 times, made me very happy. I'll have to hound him to buy Hex now, if he can find it. Strange thing was, it was the BBC version of Hip Priest, which is even more formless and experimental than the album version.

The Leeds DVD version of Hip Priest is also very unusual: only partially formed, being a very early (the first?) performance of the song.

The whole album is fantastic. Personally plumped for Mere Pseud Mag Ed, for the lyrics, quintessentially 'Fall' melody and general madness of it all, a madness no band can capture as well as the Fall.

So the fact that Hex Enducion Hour is superb, fabulous and generally a work of inspired brilliance is something we all agree on? Hurrah for this LP!

Stephen,

King of polls that you are - which album had the most even share - I have seen some where pretty much all agree it is down to two or three tracks, but HEH has a good even distribution and I wondered if this was the only one.

Does this make HEH the most perfect Fall LP, then?

See Slates.

Room To Live is nicely even in terms of votes placed so far.

Hip Priest... eh. Hex is my favourite album (although, I'll confess I've only been a Fall fan for about 5 years now.) but I only like that song about every one in three listens. But I do REALLY like it on that one listen.

Still, my vote has to go to Winter part one (surprisingly me slightly). I love the bit about 'He had a parka on... once he was a young on, but now he looked the victim... of a pogram'. Or, er, something. It's late.

Officially the most popular Fall album, going by the 1st hundred votes in the 'best studio LP' poll.

Would have been nice if the 'Iceland' atmosphere had been explored more on subsequent records.

yeah, sounds like an acoustic, slightly drunk kraftwerk to me (a Good Thing!)

this really is one of my fav fall tracks.... its 'otherness' is always compelling.... & now i shall think of acoustic slightly drunk kraftwerk & smile even more broadly :D

I went for Fortress/Deer Park. I LOVE the moment when the first track ends and the keyboards to DP fill the sound field... then it is so relentless. I never want it to end (feel this way also about Gross Chapel).

Andy

I want Brixie! (never thought I'd hear myself saying that, and probably never will again...)

It's odd with Hex.

There are other Fall albums I pull out more but this is the one that I nearly always crank all the way through every time. It's dense like some scorched earth forest still giving off gigantic billows of smoke and soot. Yet the dynamics and tensions of some pieces are sort of sparse, musically speaking.

Lots of days Hex is my hands down favorite Fall album. But EVERY day it is one of the greatest albums ever unleashed on the listening public. It's sort of draining and uplifting at once. Listening to it I have always cosidered an event almost.

This record, and a lot of The Fall's output up through 1990 (when I dropped out of music for the most part) really got me through some hard times. I'd put on this album especially and it was like my own private concert or video or something. A secret of a kind.

I made lots of Fall comps for people but I rarely put much from Hex on them because I think I wanted to keep it for myself somehow and because it's too damn good and consistent to chop up.

I love Hex so much I'm almost frightened of listening to it in case I accidentally end up loving it less

For me, it's maybe the only album-length Fall experience where they sound like a *whole band* of geniuses, rather than one genuis waiting for everyone else to catch up with him...

It's got to be The Classical. Sorry I'm so late with my vote but I've only just realised that the Poll section has really got it going on...

Been listening a lot to Hex recently since I just scored a CD copy of it (to replace my beloved long-lost vinyl version).

The track order on the album is really bizarre when I think about it. All the intense stuff is at the beginning up until Mere Pseud and then it (relatively) mellows out.

The one thing that bothers me about my CD copy is that there is a fade-out and a gap between Winter and Winter 2, where I swear there was a continuous transition on the vinyl version. Maybe I'm wrong? In any event, that fade-out and gap on the CD ruins a really good flow of music.