HAL HUTCHINSON: Wreckage Installation and Metalworks – Limited/Numbered CD and Picture Cards (Crucial Blast) 2014

THE FALL; Totale's Turns (It's Now or Never) LP, 2008 (New) Given The Fall's penchant for iconoclasm, it's no surprise that they decided to say goodbye to the '70s with a series of gigs at Northern England's gruffest halls. The band's formidable live show was met with even more derision and disorder than customary during these late '79 and early '80 performances, and they skillfully amplified such sentiments back at the crowd. Totale's Turns, The Fall's first live album, was released on Rough Trade just prior to their pivotal third album, 1980's Grotesque.

DOUBLE LEOPARDS; A hole is true LP, 2005 Recorded, appropriately enough, at the Tar Pit in Brooklyn, A Hole Is True is likely to be the group's easiest-to-find release to date, and is perhaps the most succinct distillation of their shadowy, merciless arts. The title seems a slight misdirection, as there's no sign of holes anywhere on the album's three impossibly dense squalls. Whatever its substance, the opening "Inmost Light" enters with a dizzying electric whirr that repeatedly threatens to congeal into a riff, before getting blown to pieces by a cyclone of unmoored spectral wails. "Chemical Wedding" is even simpler, just a razor-thin current of pulsing overtones, while the 21-minute "White Cadillacs" uses voices nearly recognizable as human to deliver shifty messages directly to the reptilian core of your brainstem.