Anyone who doesn’t want their favorite bands to evolve and adapt a bit to the times in which they live is fooling themselves. But that’s what made the previous two albums feel like such odd birds. It wasn’t the Fall adapting, more like uncomfortably trying to keep up with the pop charts (or was it a sly commentary on them?). The Infotainment Scan feels more like the band showing that they’re paying attention to what’s going on around them, but aren’t beholden to it. The wry wink, the post-punk groove, the broiled pop has returned with a vengeance. They peel off the leeches sucking the life out of Gary Glitter and T.Rex records (“Glam-Racket”), have more rumbling fun at the expense of the bean counters in the music industry (“The League of Bald-Headed Men”), and find a graceful way to let Dave Bush have his MIDI-driven fun amid the kind of disquieting, repetitive rock that made The Fall who they were (his Madchester notes on “A Past Gone Mad” and “Service” add some nice bounce to the mix). There’s still a strangely sanitized quality to it that feels unsatisfying. That it found the band shedding almost entirely the techno baggage that weighed down the previous two studio albums, and that the English press finally started paying attention to the Fall again leading to this album breaking the Top 10 in the U.K. Albums Chart upon release, might be skewing people’s opinions of it a bit. For American audiences who missed out on Shift-Work and Code: Selfish due to both not being released Stateside, Infotainment didn’t have the headier punch that we were bracing for.