Pitchfork: CMJ Report: Saturday [Marc Hogan]

The Fall [Hiro Ballroom; c. 9:15 p.m.]

If you're at all familiar with Mark E. Smith, you sort of expect him to fuck with you. So it wasn't entirely disappointing when, around the time Smith and the current incarnation of the Fall were expected to take the stage at the Hiro Ballroom, some guy with a laptop came out instead and poked big-screen PowerBook fun at easy targets-- Tom Jones, fat Elvis, Barbra Streisand-- in the guise of avant-garde audiovisual.

By the time Smith took the stage, the band's rhythm-heavy post-punk assault was well overdue. Though the whole thing was over in five or six songs (only the guys with video cameras know for sure), Smith's typically inscrutable persona and the solid grooves (two bass guitars, after San Francisco-based openers the Ohsees didn't even have one!) made for time well spent right through to a bristling cover of the Move's "I Can Hear the Grass Grow". And then it was all over, despite vain, half-hearted efforts to get the clever bastard back out for an encore.

The Fall