The Seventy Sevens - All Fall Down (1984)

I was very late to the party with The 77s, and over the years I would work my way backward through the band's discography. The band's first three albums were on a wicked little CD box set, 123 that I spent entirely too much money on, but it was worth it. The downside was it was too much all at once and honestly I never spent enough time with the individual albums. It just ended up being an overwhelming experience and a check in the box for my completest tendencies.

Don't get me wrong, I listened and I marvelled at the high points and pushed through the songs that didn't immediately resonate. I was taking in a band more than I was an album. 

Whereas now, I'm sitting here four decades after the fact trying to process and catalogue an album that in a perfect world should have been in my collection from the get go. Did I mention I was late to the party?

Live and learn right?

In my defence 1984 was right in the heart of those dark years where I was disillusioned with so much of the shitty Christian music I'd forced myself to listen to for a number of years. Looking back on it really was like a big bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. Except the really good beans were in the minority. After a couple of years of listening to so many puke flavoured albums with really questionable theology I'd had enough. That's how I missed out on The Seventy Sevens when they first came out. My buddy Dave tried to tell me, he really did, but I didn't want to hear.

I found my vinyl copy of All Fall Down at the same little shop in Seattle where I found their debut. If that sentence isn't clear, I was trying to say I got the two albums and the same time, but it seemed too easy to just say that. I looked and looked but the band's third album but it was no where to be found in the store - although I did find 20/20 so it wasn't a complete loss. The "Island" album remains one of my unicorns. Never say never, right? That was Petra ... never mind.

I've been trying to jot my thoughts down for a while and I can never quite get it right. I've written and rewritten this a few times now. If you're reading this, I've either just said screw it and posted what I have, or I managed to polish it up enough that it seemed good enough. I'll let you decide. I'm inclined to go with the screw it option. I actually thought I'd posted this months ago ... I just found it in my draft folder. Oops. I'll put the album on again while I dust this off. It's funny in the interim between starting this post the band actually started a Kickstarter for a new album ... and I have their new record and really want to give it a listen but I have to clear this out of the way first. Make sense? I am a slave to a self imposed order of operations.

Back when I wrote up Ping Pong Over the Abyss I spent a fair bit of time digesting the debut, an album that is derided more than it should be. Was it uneven? Perhaps. Was it good? Undoubtedly. Then there's All Fall Down. The band managed to level up between records. This is so good. Still so good. The band also swapped out drummers, replacing Mark Proctor with Aaron Smith whose credentials included stints with The Temptations, and Romeo Void. 

I don't want to heap too much praise on the album, it's not a perfect album but it's pretty bloody good. The band may have been developing their own sound, but there was also something (a vibe?) about that album put them in the same bucket as some of their peers at the time. Not in a bad way.

The album opens with "Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba" and from there the band just kept setting them up and knocking them down. Sure not everything is top shelf, but man oh man the hit to miss ratio is pretty freakin' impressive. Even a weird clunker like "Under the Heat" is pretty good. It's one of the songs I always think of as a stinker until I hear it and then it's so weirdly infectious that I find myself questioning myself as to why I shit on the song.

Over subsequent albums 77s  music tended to fall into two rather distinct categories, blistering blues infused rock and the pretty mid tempo pop songs. Their meandering blues romps while energetic and blistering were never my cup of tea, and the absence of a song like "Pearls Before Swine" (that appears on the follow up album to All Fall Down) which (to me) is a long self indulgent bit of musical hubris that made some people's faces melt was a welcome omission on All Fall Down. "You Don't Scare Me" is as close to the cacophony they get here and frankly the song is a banger. As a result this album feels like an album and not a disjointed pastiche of musical fridge art.

Don't get me wrong, variety is the slice of life, and a lot of bands can't navigate their way through the musical forest let alone carve themselves a nice little path, complete with a little shrubbery for a nice two level effect. Heck, I'd go so far as to say The 77s were pretty adept and sounding like themselves regardless of where they went musically. Whether or not it all worked is another story, and even that is very much an ear of the beholder thing. I'm partial to the pretty songs and others wish there was more noise. What we can all agree on is that 77s are a great band.

Period. 

For me there's something special about this album. It was early in their career. You can practically hear the promise in the grooves. The band was hungry and they had the goods to back it up. For all that it's still viewed by many as the stepping stone that got them closer to the infamous "Island" record, the one that should have been, that wasn't. To me All Fall Down is one of their best albums in a long line of really good albums.