shoddy". It consists of a series of pen scribbles laid down by Smith. The markings are mostly random rhetorical phrases and sentence fragments added by Smith and include wording such as "Lie-Dream 80% of 10% OR 6% over no less than 1/4 = ??????", "Hail Sainsbury's!", "CHUMMY LIFESTYLE", "HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS" and "CIGS. SMOKED HERE". In an interview with Sounds that summer, Smith mentioned that he liked artwork to reflect the album content and that his graphic choices reflected his attitude to music. He mentioned how he was drawn to cheap and misspelled posters, amateur layouts of local papers and printed cash and carry signs with "inverted commas where you don't need them". The album art was seen by many within the music industry as coarse and lacking accepted layout or typographical qualities. HMV would only shelve the sleeve back to front on their racking shelves. ReceptionHex Enduction Hour was the first Fall album to reach the UK Albums Chart, where it spent three weeks, peaking at no. 71. By mid-1983 it had sold 20,000 copies, reflecting a surge in the band's popularity, and five years into their career brought them to the attention of major record labels. Critics were highly enthusiastic. Reviewing for the NME, Richard Cook described the band as tighter and more disciplined than in earlier recordings, and call Hex as "their master piece to date". He praised their use of recording-studio techniques and atmospherics without resorting to glamorisation. Melody Makers Colin Irwin said it was "incredibly exciting and utterly compelling". Edwin Pouncey of Sounds said it was "the furthest adventure the Fall have ever embarked upon, one that absorbs and holds the listener in a grip of iron. It is also more importantly the Fall's finest hour." A dissenter was Neil McCormick of Irish fortnightly Hot Press, who dismissed the album as secondhand melodramatic punk and said that if the album was "meant to be minimalist or primitive then it fatally ignores the true primitivism of the strong melody and accessible lyrics found in folk music." Later, Record Collector described the album as a "taut, twitchy and ominous masterclass in DIY post-punk", and singled out Smith's lyrics for praise. The Quietus, in 2009, wrote of the album as "arguably ... The Fall's mightiest hour", while Stylus Magazine wrote that "Hex demonstrates the culmination of 'early' Fall: a monolithic beast of ragged grooves piloted through the