* PREORDER * FALL, THE - Cerebral Caustic LP

* PREORDER * expected to arrive late Aug / early Sept

Curated in conjunction with Fall expert Conway Patton and has liner notes by Fall guru Daryl Easlea. Mastered by long-time engineer Andy Pearce with art by Becky Stewart.

Mark E Smith went back to basics for this offering. The recordings are deliberately lo-fi, particularly when compared with some of the Fall's preceding albums. The keyboards and synthetic textures were ditched in favour of a heavy, messy guitar-dominated sound.

Brix returned on guitar and the track "Don't Call Me Darling" features an angry duet with an infectious chorus line. Her co-vocal on "Don't Call Me Darling" and "Feeling Numb" are outstanding. So is also their cover of Zappa's "I'm Not satisfied".

The raucous atmosphere and raw sonic experimentation mostly make up for this, however, and the album's most intriguing track bucks the trend - "Bonkers In Phoenix" is an all-too-accurate vision of how it felt to be in the middle of a music festival in the 1990s.