Confirming Manchester’s rapid rise to music capital of England, The Fall released their second – and first essential – album Dragnet just a few months after Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Led by Mark E. Smith, master of maledictions, The Fall present a lo-fi anti-rock, anti-pop stance with a kind of sardonic garage music backing tirades of poetic invective. The world of Dragnet is a bloody smear across the face of England’s gloating elite, a backstreet abortion that survived to terrorize its failed destroyers through superior will and intelligence.