“Has the world changed or have I changed?” asks Morrissey in the title track of the new Smiths album The Queen Is Dead. For once, the question is not rhetorical. Of course, the singer hasn't put his obsessions aside: the album contains songs about being buried alive, picnicking in cemeteries, his mother, Oscar Wilde and the beauty of isolating himself from the world. Morrissey's unmistakable vocal style, a kind of Edith Piaf on the dole, and Johnny Marr's wall of guitars are still there, but the Smiths sound somehow different: confident, no longer self-obsessed.
It's hard to imagine Morrissey making fun of himself, and yet here he is the moralist of Meat Is Murder who sings a song entitled Bigmouth Strikes Again. As effected guitar sounds (wah-WAH) open onto powerful drums, Morrissey examines his conscience and recognizes that a brilliant mind can easily fall into superficiality. He opened his eyes or maybe just the windows of his studio apartment.
The Queen Is Dead pokes fun at the media's obsession with the royal family with guitar blasts and an aggressive bassline, while Frankly, Mr. Shankly it's a divertissement, the story of the resignation of a delivery boy set to a light backing track from the Kinks area. In Vicar in Tutu we listen to a steel guitar with a country flavor apparently incompatible with Morrissey's very English diction and yet that very sound makes the key image of the song indelible: a preacher who shouts from the pulpit dressed as a woman. Who knows what Johnny Cash would say…
As expected, there's also the melancholy Morrissey of I Know It's Over And Never Had No One Ever (“I've never had anyone”… except mom, obviously). But even when he reaches the highest level of affectation, pitting Wilde against Keats and Yeats in a battle between poets in Cemetry Gateshe does it in more melodic songs than ever, raising unlikely verses to the sky. Like it or not, this guy is going to be around for a long time.
From Rolling Stone US.
