The Graun's Alexis Petridis is
not impressed with the new Morrissey album:
At least the sound fits the lyrics, which are so horribly sour you could make cottage cheese by leaving a pint of milk next to the speakers while it's playing. Morrissey has been petulant and nasty before, but there was usually a mitigating hint of arched eyebrow, or a flash of wit. Here, there's nothing but vituperative clumsiness: "You lied about the lies you told, which is the full extent of what being you is all about."
It's not so much that you've heard what he has to say on Black Cloud or That's How People Grow Up before; it's more that you've heard him say it better. There's a compelling argument that Morrissey keeps attracting new, young fans because his apparently immutable worldview, in which it's always someone else's fault and everything is so unfair, chimes with their own adolescent experience. But it's difficult to hear him singing, "There's so much destruction all over the world and all you can do is complain about me," without thinking: is this any way for a man who's nearly 50 to be carrying on? Clearly, this thought has crossed Morrissey's mind as well. "I know by now you think I should have straightened myself out," he sings elsewhere. "Thank you. Drop dead."
Yuck. No doubt Petridis felt as smug as the Cheshire Cat as he added that last full stop to his oh so clever critique. Personally, I think the new album is great, and, 'get over it' teenage bedsit angst be damned, still feel exactly the same way I did more than twenty years ago at age 16.
And yes, even then I understood that to be human was essentially a conflict between the selfish 'animal' versus, to quote a friend quoting Seinfeld, the fact that we 'are living in a society'. It seems the reviewer once got it, but now thinks "that joke isn't funny any more".. Too bad for him.
Umm, my point I think is now lost, so let me just try to save this comment with the Lewis Carroll quote I probably meant to start with.. "I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat'...."