Quick Before it Melts

Friday 23 January 2009

Morrisey: the Naughts-y Years

I fully admit that I’m surprised my response to the new Morrissey album has been to salivate and swoon like the 17 year old boy I was when I sat second row centre at Kingswood Music Theatre in Toronto during his show on the Kill Uncle tour.  I really am taken aback that I’m voraciously playing Years Of Refusal with the same zeal and frantic energy that drove me into a small throng of fans at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1992, desperately grasping a swatch of Morrissey’s discarded blue lamé shirt which he shed during his performance on the Your Arsenal tour.  On that fateful evening, as seven of us tugged and pulled on that already-fraying piece of fabric, mob mentality gave way to cooler heads–one of us brandished a pocket knife and we all divvied up the shirt among us so that each took home a souvenir of the night’s performance.  We walked away clutching a small piece of our hero close to our hearts.  In much that same way, I’m holding onto Years Of Refusal with a sense of wonder and anticipation, admiration and adoration, for one of the seminal icons of indie music has come back to us, and he sounds fresh and new and better than ever.

I thought it was over between Morrissey and me.  I really did.  I met the release of Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted with an increasing sense of ennui and disinterest after the spectacular Vauxhall and I and Your Arsenal.  Instead of meticulously examining new lyric sheets and repeatedly playing the new records, I retreated to the multiple best-of-most-of-repackage-repackage collections that highlighted his excellent early solo work.  But I should know by now that you never count a good Mancunian out.

“Irish Blood English Heart” (You Are The Quarry) made my soul swoon again in 2004; “I Will See You In Far Off Places” (Ringleader of the Tormentors) blew my socks off in 2006, and now “Something Is Squeezing My Skull” has me drooling like a fool in 2009.  “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore” is perhaps one of the most caustic and biting songs he’s ever written, and features the most dynamic arrangement his lyrics have been set to since “The Death of a Disco Dancer”.  This is the fighting fit Morrissey–the Morrissey promised by the pugilistic-heavy imagery that accompanied Southpaw Grammar–that isn’t going to lay down and let the mealy mouthed upstarts upstage him.  No one can pull a Morrissey lyric off like Morrissey;  in any other hands (or mouth as it were) the words and sentiment sound hollow, affected, and tongue-in-cheek.  This is perhaps Morrissey’s most punk-rock set of songs yet, and has a grittiness and raw feeling that unfortunately was glossed over on the last couple albums.

Years of Refusal will be out on February 16 in the UK on Decca Records, and the next day in North America via Lost Highway.  He’s on tour from the end of February through to June, playing many venues in the U.S. and Europe.  He’ll even make a stop in my neck of the woods, coming to Buffalo, NY, in March.

MP3: Morrissey “Something Is Squeezing My Skull”
Facebook: Morrissey
Myspace: Morrissey
Buy: Morrissey Years of Refusal

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by J. Di Gioia | 2 Comments »

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