I don’t know what possessed me to waste an hour of my finite life on this new Morrissey record. Masochism? I knew full well it would be garbage—this man hasn’t produced anything worth a damn since The Smiths, and even his solo “highlight,” Vauxhall and I, is basically The Smiths lite.
Morrissey, of course, continues his lifelong mission of being the most insufferable man in rock music. This is the clown prince who cancelled shows because a venue’s neighbouring businesses dared to sell meat and who recently described a hotel in Valencia, near a festival, as an “indescribable hell” because the noise kept him, a grown adult rock star, from his beauty sleep. He’s cancelled 111 shows since 2012—one hundred and eleven—because the universe hasn’t sufficiently reorganized itself around his delicate sensibilities. Oh, and somewhere in between his diva meltdowns, he found time to cozy up to right-wing UK nationalism and Zionist apologetics, because of reasons…
But fine. Maybe his long-suffering fans deserve someone to sit through this so they don’t have to. So I did. God help me, I did. The album cover alone should have been a warning: Morrissey, slightly out of focus, gaping at the camera with his mouth hanging open like a man who’s just been told the vegan steakhouse is fully booked. It might be the worst album cover I’ve seen in years. The big mouth has struck again, indeed—only this time it’s swallowing whatever remained of his credibility whole.
The album occasionally stumbles into something resembling competence. The opener “Your Right, It’s Time” and the closer “The Monsters of Pig Alley” are fine—jangly 80s post-punk with Morrissey doing his trademark overwrought crooning about social media decay and, in the latter, something resembling an acoustic murder ballad. They suggest a musician who could still make a decent record if he bothered to try.
But he does not bother to try. Everything in between is a slow-motion catastrophe, just utter dribble. The title track consists almost entirely of Morrissey repeating “Make-up is a Lie” in slightly different tones, as though he’s testing a microphone and no one had the nerve to stop him. “Notre-Dame” sounds like he’s reading aloud from a newspaper he found on the floor of a Paris café, before giving up entirely and just looping the same phrase into the void. His Roxy Music cover of “Amazona” is a war crime against the original. “Boulevard” sounds like a drunk toddler’s lullaby, which I mean as an insult to both drunk toddlers and lullabies. He tries this nursery vibe again later on “Kerching Kerching,” also with terrible, uninspired lyrics like “not man enough, not fast enough / not you enough, you don’t joke enough / because you just do not take coke enough….
But “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy,” takes the cake. It’s an armpit, the event horizon of creative bankruptcy. In it, Morrissey lists animals. Dogs. Cats. Frogs. Whatever else wanders through his increasingly unfurnished mind. “He wants to save the cows and the sheep / and the squiggles of the deep”—squiggles of the deep, Morrissey. What the fuck are you singing about? This is a man who co-wrote “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” A man who once made suburban English misery sound like high art. And now he is mumbling about farm animals over an electric sitar, apparently having forgotten to write actual lyrics before hitting record.
This album isn’t a disappointment because disappointment implies expectation. This is just a sad, soggy document of a great talent choosing, over and over again, not to be great or just having lost it altogether.
