Thus we enter the curious third act of the Fall’s history, a 15-year long period where MES brought on and disposed of band members with reckless disregard and, with them, anything resembling consistency on the band’s last 10 albums. This period really began on the disastrous tour that they did to support Levitate, a jaunt that concluded with MES fighting with his bandmates on stage and back at the hotel, winding up in jail as a result. Hence, outside of Julia Nagle who, for some reason, stuck it out, everyone else was completely new.

That helps likely explain the roughshod quality of what we are given on this disc. They crib the music from an old Northern Soul single for one tune, slapped a couple of cover tunes on to it, let producer Steve Hitchcock remix a track that MES recorded with another group, and let the group rewrite a song from Levitate. And that’s not including the tape collages here. This has to be one of the most slapdash Fall collections outside of the many live albums in circulation (or the CD reissues mastered from awful vinyl copies of the original albums). Caps must be doffed to those few moments on here when this gang of newbies find balance with MES: the cover of Tommy Blake’s “F-‘Oldin’ Money” is a lot of fun, and there’s a cool burn to “Anecdotes+Antidotes in B#.” Hardly enough to make up for the slapdash material around, but just enough to keep it out of the bottom spot of this list.