I'm not going to pretend that I would have picked the same 39 tracks for a compilation such as this, but I would have picked many of them. The Fall have been a wildly underrated band. They are massive, artistically. The best rock band you haven't heard. The kings of grunge. The best rock band of the past 27 years. A white rap phenomenon. The best at what they do. If you're thinking of checking them out via this compilation, you should.

The buzz among many reviewers of this album has been that The Fall were starting to get their act together, moving out of "cult" status towards wider appreciation, blah blah blah. Well in retrospect it's not as strong an album as "Live at the Witch Trials" or "Dragnet" had been. I think that one reason for that is that each of those albums were done when the band had highly imaginitive drummers in them (Karl Burns and Mike Leigh, who is quite underrated).

By contrast, here the guitars play the same fragile, dissonant type of lines as on "Dragnet" but the band's sound is more straight-ahead and linear, less interesting frankly but more a straight backdrop for Smith's singing/rapping/slurring/barking. Smith, if not his band, was in top form. On "New Face in Hell" and "C-and-C Mithering" he acheives a great and wonderful inertia that I can't compare to anything else, he's really laying a new template for what an angry young man with a microphone can do in music.

On those 2 tracks and on a few others, the band reaches some nice peaks behind the voice. "New Face in Hell" especially is an astonishing example of what a few young guys with instruments can acheive with imagination and perseverance - a great, astonishing groove. But there is a substantial amount of filler on this record. It's about half-great. This is mitigated by the inclusion of 4 impressive single tracks, one of which - "How I Wrote Elastic Man" - is The Fall at peak brilliance level. As well as a silly and brief "self-interview" Smith did in 1980, for completists.

Is the sound quality here better than on previous issues? Yes. Castle/Sanctuary did another great job of putting out a definitive edition with maximal sound quality.

This is a very strong record by any standards. The Fall have been a prolific, innovative band for a long time and hereon they use some of the same bag of tricks they've used in previous eras (overlapping vocals and words, unapologetically minimal keyboard, primitive rhythms, Mark Smith's wonderfully atonal vocal style) to impressive effect.

Not every track on here is great, but a number of them are. The music bears some resemblance to the type of "garage" or "grunge" that was in vogue in the 90's, but it is better than most of that, and the sound here is largely perfect, full of energy but clean. I think the committed Fall fan will enjoy this, and the rock listener who's never heard of The Fall will enjoy it at least as much.

You might think me biased, because I was heavily into the show (and these particular shows) when I was young, and I have studied them in the intervening years, and have the episodes pretty well memorized.

But, unlike other things that once amused me that now seem flatter and duller - this show remains astonishing. Just to see the jokes laid out with somewhat more visual clarity sometimes brings tears to my eyes.

The writing is fine to excellent, very great comedy writing ala the best of "Saturday Night Live" and "Mr. Show". The clever format, great makeup and sets, and sharp writing make this a great show. What makes SCTV truly astonishing is the power of the cast. Never have 7 people this funny worked together as a team, like this. My god these people were awesome. Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, and Eugene Levy were comedy geniuses. Catherine O'Hara was such a powerhouse, such a force of nature, that it isn't even funny (to steal a phrase). These people all worked later but all did their best work here by a mile.

The shows look good and the extras are put together well. The commentaries and mini-documentaries leave you, to paraphrase Lola Heatherton, hurting for more. This cycle of shows and the one after this are SCTV's peak, and a peak for sketch comedy.

For many years other shows, most notably Saturday Night Live, stole jokes from SCTV. (Want examples? Compare the recent Christopher Walken "Pranksters" sketch with the funnier "Revenge!" sketch from a later SCTV show. Compare the Celebrity Jeapordy sketches to the "Halfwits" game show from a later SCTV show. They've been stealing jokes for 15 years now.) Hopefully this great show will now find a modern audience.

The music here is stupendous. But it's all available now on the 2004 "expanded reissues" of "Live at the Witch Trials" and "Dragnet", in superior fidelity.

These guys were trying to do something different, and they did. They interjected much of the feel of "acting" and roleplaying and their own personalities into state-of-the-art sketch comedy.

And their sketches focused on real elements of life (the family unit, the work environment) in ways that hadn't been done before. And they were FUNNY as heck some of the time. And overly effete and surreal some of the time - which is true of Monty Python's Flying Circus as well if you really get down to it.

If you like Monty Python, SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and/or the great underknown "Mr. Show" you should definitely give these guys a spin. They did great work together. The set looks good and the extras on Disc 4 are quite good and promote a better understanding of what this group was doing and what they were about.

I was at one of the shows recorded here, and my impression of the show that night matches my impression of this disc. It is, in part, brilliant. Specifically, when Cross is doing "political" material or material that relates to the flaws in our society and culture. When he moves away to other topics/areas, he becomes more ordinary and at times just irritating. He should not run from a reputation as a political satirist, he should embrace it - the better half of this material is phenomenal, as was his 2002 album to an even greater degree. He is an effective storyteller as well, but as a stand-up his desire to irritate and offend works best when he is railing against the villain that is right-wing America.

Tracks 3, 7, and 8 are probably the highlights here and if you're a thinking person who shares Cross' disgust with the afore-mentioned right-wing America you will probably laugh until you hemmorage. Cross at his best is like Bill Maher or AL Franken with more bite and anger.

The album is a magnificent creation. The music consists of disparate elements (awesome spikey guitar, busy drumming, simplistic keyboards, bass, and slurring barking voice), held together by passion and energy. This band posessed more ambition and ability than their peer group (Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam, PIL, Sioxsie & Banshees, Gang of 4, and other great bands). It's a mystery to me why they weren't more appreciated.

This edition puts the album forward in its best light, in nice fidelity, and collects practically all other available tracks from this band in this era. The last 12 tracks, from a Liverpool gig in 1978, have terrible fidelity but this is not important because the preceding collection of tracks, including 2 45's from the time and 2 tracks recorded for "Live at the Electric Circus" are frankly astonishing.

This is The Fall's second album - the lineup which recorded their debut "Live at the Witch Trials" fell apart, and bandleader Mark Smith recruited mostly-new working-class lads into his band, which was now more guitar-based and Velvet Underground-influenced. They recorded this album which was generally thought to be so far-out and abrasive that it was "practically unlistenable".

This 2004 edition is undoubtably definitive. It sounds much better than the previous CD issue that I have (not that that one was especially bad). I think that the sound, the full psyched-out fractured glory the band was after, comes through much stronger than it has before. All instruments are distinctly audible and the "muddy, distant" sound the album was formerly noted for is no hindrence to being moved by this music. For the first time, I find myself transfixed by the album.

It's a strong, wild, imaginative album. The band's time is not rock-solid but it's not bad either. Rock and rockabilly rythms collide with guitar drone and primal rhythms to create a mood of unease - kinetically spikey unease. Influenced somewhat by Captain Beefheart and Public Image Limited along with the Velvets but going further in many directions than those bands did, this record is a real acheivement. As is its sonic restoration.

The Fall and their leader were into drugs at this time, and it shows. This music is extremely wigged-out. In places ("Cary Grant's Wedding", "Fiery Jack", "Spectre vs. Rector") this music needs no justification, it is perfect and unique. In other places, it's less impressive and the low-fidelity recording will annoy you to death. It doesn't get stranger or more abrasive than this album. Mark Smith was following his wigged-out, low-fidelity muse. For a Fall fan this is indeed a must-have item as the songs I named above do not sound like this anywhere else. The band went on to coalesce into something a bit more of this earth on the follow-up LP "Groteque".