Coming back to the debut album of one of the most beloved - and yes, legitimately best - bands of the '80s might seem like a mug's game. There are the general issues as regards the weight of expectations and the solidified layers of How It Was one needs to chip through- musical opinion fossilising rather quickly than did dinosaur bones. Then you've got the specific issues around The Smiths, by which - and let's not be coy, since the man himself only ever approved of that when writing lyrics, and not always even then- that absolute fuckwit Morrissey.
For all that "Still Ill" (which I focused on here) now reads less like satire and more like the rough draft of a manifesto, though, I can't deny that it remains a gorgeous song, filled with anger and sadness and a sense that things aren't actually going to get better in the way we were always told they would be, just so we'd stop complaining about how awful things are now.
This sense of discomfort with both the awful past and the surely awful future suffuses The Smiths. The fact that it's clearly Morrissey's personal discomfort is never less than obvious; as with literally the entirety of his career, you're never more than a few bars from him referencing some unknown figure he wants to lay into, or be laid by, or both.
But neither this laser-focus on his own problems, nor his later quixotic crusade to demonstrate one doesn't need a taste for a full English to be a lager-bellied shirt-shirking racist shit-heel, stops the album from working. Indeed, what's remarkable here is, not just that it works so well, but that it works so well as a Smiths album. To deny him the charity he so clearly doesn't deserve, it's not surprising that Morrissey was already so Olympically self-involved he could nail his "Woe is me, woeful is you" schtick at the first try. More positively, Marr's gorgeous, multi-layered guitar impossibilities explode from the ether fully formed. Opener "Reel Around The Fountain" doesn't so much set up his stall as burn down everything else in the market.
Has there ever been a debut album that so perfectly encapsulated what a band was, that so effortlessly staked out the territory it would explore throughout its existence? Not just in the sense of being rough sketches of what was to come, either. The one-two punch of "This Charming Man" and "Still Ill" is as fine a pairing as the band ever achieved.
I'm not saying the band never developed from this first platter. There's a looseness here, a fuzziness, a sense of playfulness that is rather less arch than what comes after. Still, while "...Fountain" or "Suffer Little Children" might not sound quite right if you stuck them somewhere on The Queen Is Dead, I'd be hard-pressed to explain quite why.
More than any other band I can think of, The Smiths arrived so fully-formed, and imploded so near the top of their game, that it sometimes feels as though time stood still for them - that every song arrived simultaneously from some other place, with Morrissey and Marr simply choosing which songs to dole out with every subsequent release.
Their choices here are tough to find fault with. There's a reason the musical landscape found itself transformed after The Smiths and The Smiths revealed themselves. The most glorious space-time anomaly opened up in 1982 Lancashire, only to close five years later. The kings may be dead, or at least their magic drained from the world, but this lush, louche remnant is a reminder of the time when the world was briefly theirs.
Eight and a half tentacles.
No comments:
Post a Comment