Totally Wired

"Totally Wired" runs at the tempo of a thought that won't stop finishing itself. The guitar is trebly and insistent, the bass high in the mix and almost conversational in its movement, and the whole thing clatters forward with the manic energy of someone who has consumed too much of something and cannot slow down enough to decide whether that's wonderful or terrible. The production has a cheap, live-wire quality — nothing padded or softened — and the drums arrive with a clatter that sounds less recorded than captured mid-incident. Mark E. Smith's delivery here is almost comedic in its intensity, the words tumbling out with the rhythm of genuine agitation, his voice a vehicle for a very specific state of heightened, jittery alertness. The lyrical subject is at once mundane and hallucinatory: the sensation of stimulant overconsumption rendered as social observation, the way everything becomes slightly too vivid and meaningful under those conditions. Released in 1980, it arrived at the moment when post-punk was beginning to fragment into too many studied poses, and The Fall's answer was to be maximally themselves — provincial, peculiar, and faster than comfortable. This is music for the pre-dawn hours when sleep is no longer a realistic option, or for the walk to somewhere you're slightly too agitated to explain. It does not soothe; it validates.