CD Odyssey Disc 532: The Smiths

Last night Sheila and I treated ourselves to a nice romantic dinner at Il Terrazzo.  I had the venison steak and it was as good as it ever was.

And despite one too many martinis I am up early (benefits of the body clicking into early hours for work) ready to write this next review.

Disc 532 is…. The Queen is Dead

For crying out loud man, get up and get a glass of water or something.

Artist: The Smiths

Year of Release: 1986

What’s up with the Cover?  According to the liner notes this is some sixties actor named Alain Delon.  Yet another “I fall on the thorns of life, I bleed” cover from the Smiths; excessively maudlin and melodramatic.

How I Came To Know It:  Actually, I heard about this album on some VH-1 countdown.  I think it was “Top 100 albums of the past 25 years” and it aired around 2005.  This album was on their list, and since Sheila had already introduced me to the Smiths (“Louder Than Bombs” reviewed just last month at Disc 524) I decided to give it a chance.

How It Stacks Up:  We have only two Smiths albums.  I’ll put “The Queen Is Dead” at #1 by a larger margin than I expected when I reviewed “Louder Than Bombs”.

Rating:  4 stars

I was sixteen when this album came out and at the time was fully immersed in heavy metal.  A big part of my attraction to metal at that time was its outsider nature.  The idea of being a new wave Goth was abhorrent to me at the time.  As an adult I can see that despite the very different music, the Smiths had exactly the same iconoclastic appeal that metal had.  In the eighties this album was probably held with the same deep affection by the Goth crowd that metal-heads like me held for Iron Maiden’s “Powerslave.”

Years later I still favour “Powerslave” but the years have given me a broader spectrum of musical tastes, and I can see why “The Queeen is Dead” is such an iconic album for so many people.  The melodies have a pretty, lilting quality.  Many songs sound inspired by old forties and fifties crooners, adapted to a new wave sensibility.  Morrissey could easily have been a famous lounge singer if he’d been born thirty years earlier.

Morrissey’s ability to inject pathos into very over-the-top lyrics is front and centre again, but if anything his voice is even better than on “Louder Than Bombs.”  Moreover, while the songs still stray close to overly dramatic, I found myself getting much more drawn into them this time.  This was particularly true for “I Know It’s Over” which is an honest and affecting song about loneliness.  I expect this song got many a sad teen through some legitimately tough times and let even more of them better enjoy wallowing in some pointless misery (a long-standing teen pastime).  There is one little riff in the background of the song that sounds a lot like the 1984 Pretender’s song “2000 Miles” but hey, I like that song too.

On the other end, the band displays their sense of humour with the catchy sing-a-long track “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” which is equal parts dismissive satire to the character of Mr. Shankly and a basic rejection of a normal life in search of fame.  Lines like these:

“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve held

It paves my way, but it corrodes my soul

I want to leave, you will not miss me

I want to go down in musical history.”

Makes me think that Mr. Shankly is a Soulless Record Exec.  Later in the song Morrissey attacks Mr. Shankly’s terrible poetry and calls him a ‘flatulent pain in the ass.’  Sounds like a Soulless Record Exec. to me.  To which Mr. Shankly, the Soulless Record Exec would reply – ‘hey, who went down in musical history?  The title of the song has my name in it!”  Well played as ever, Soulless Record Exec., well played.  But I digress…

The other thing about “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is just how pretty the song is.  At its core it is a pretty basic pop song but there is an art to taking simple, oft-used musical progressions and making them fresh and new, a characteristic notable through the whole album.

The poor spelling of the song “Cemetry Gates” is offensive, but I forgave it when I heard the song.  “Cemetry Gates” is an exceptional pop song, with a breezy, summer day quality to it.  Despite the song being about the ephemeral nature of life, I just got visions of two young lovers skipping through the graveyard, spinning and dancing their way through the gravestones, sunlight filtering in through all those trees that a good graveyard is populated with.  Hey, we’re all slowly dying, so we might as well have something to dance to.

Also, while the song goes out of its way to name drop with lines like “Keats and Yeats are on your side/While Wilde is on mine” I happen to like literary references, and the Smiths make them work effortlessly in service of the song’s theme.

Johnny Marr plays his guitar with his usual reserved excellence, light on the strings but still with focus and intensity.  Marr’s willingness to hold the guitar back in the mix and let the bass and drum ground these tracks is commendable, and gives the album a nice balanced production quality.

“The Queen is Dead” is tastefully restrained at ten tracks and under forty minutes, and there are no bad songs.  “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” and “Vicar in a Tutu” are a bit too ‘novelty song’ after you’ve heard the album a few times, but they are good on first blush and besides – that’s how novelty songs are supposed to work.

I expected to like this album, but I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did.  The maudlin qualities are toned down from what I expect from the Smiths, and as I write this review I’m hearing the album for the fourth time in a row and still enjoying it immensely.  If you ever wanted to get into the Smiths but were afraid of all the pouty, tear-drop-tattoo reputation of the band, then “The Queen is Dead” is a great “Cemetry gateway” album to get you started. 

Best tracks:  Frankly Mr. Shankly, I Know It’s Over, Never Had No One Ever, Cemetry Gates, There Is A Light That Never Goes Out