It's miraculous enough that it exists at all, but that "Reformation: Post TLC" is something of a high-water mark for The Fall [ tickets ] over the last decade can only be considered proof that it's Mark E. Smith's planet and we just pay rent.

It's miraculous enough that it exists at all, but that "Reformation: Post TLC" is something of a high-water mark for The Fall over the last decade can only be considered proof that it's Mark E. Smith's planet and we just pay rent.

How this album came together is an even stranger story than one usually expects from The Fall, now some 26 studio albums into a career that began in the late '70s and looking like it could conceivably last forever.

The group was on the opening stretch of its US tour last spring when three band members decided they could no longer put up with leader Smith's dictatorial ways and fled home to Old Blighty on the next flight out of Phoenix. Any mortal man would have given up then and there, but Smith merely phoned his record company, requested some new musicians be sent his way, then promptly hit the stage with them a couple of days later in San Diego. Then he took his new charges into a recording studio and made this album.

The classic Fall sound is present and center, as always, from Smith's maniacal laugh introducing opener "Over! Over!" to the very last cut. Smith's gang of American replacements jump right into battle, bullets whizzing precariously past their helmets, and dive right into the material, which is some of the band's strongest in years.

"Reformation" and "Fall Sound" find Smith in great voice, with his makeshift American band following behind him in lockstep groove. Bassist Rob Barbato and drummer Orpheo McCord might never play on another Fall album, but on this one they become the band's most threatening rhythm section since its late-'80s salad days.

The relentless pace of the album slows only a few times, once for a rollicking cover of Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever," and also for "Coach and Horses," which scribbles a melodic electric-guitar line over Smith's complaint about ... something.

A truly bizarre "highlight" is the 10-minute-plus "Das Boat," which consists of little but squiggly, electronic noises with occasional vocal interjections from the band. Even this is excusable; it's followed two songs later by "Systematuc Abuse," one of the best tunes Smith has written in years.