The beginning of the Beggars Banquet era, my favorite period of Fall albums. We’ve got real drummers, Hanley and Scanlon in tandem with Brix, and Mark as mad as ever. It’s a kind of popular music now, in part because John Leckie has always excelled as presenting mayhem as method and can make a song narratively sensible. I think this sounds like a greatest hits album from a much better world. You can absolutely play this one in the car. What’s Mark mad about now! “It’ the Scotch end of the market now,” which I guess is about Orange Juice. “God-box,” conceived in the haze of love, preface by a cassette recording of Mark asking Brix what the song is. When Brix said “We call you Hitler and then kick you around like homogenized milk,” I felt that.

– Sasha Frere-Jones