The album was produced by Joe Chiccarelli and recorded at Studio La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, as well as Sunset Sound in Hollywood. In a press release, Morrissey called the album "the very best of me" and "too good to be true... too true to be considered good". Producer Joe Chiccarelli described it as Morrissey's "boldest and most adventurous album yet", claiming that he has "pushed the boundaries yet again – both musically and lyrically".
Significant parts of the album verge on the avant garde, and certainly mark a bold departure for an artist who could easily have continued appeasing his cult faithful with winsome torch songs, ennui-encased indie pop and rapacious rockabilly. For many Mozza fans, this is the equivalent of misdialling The Samaritans and getting through to Piers Morgan. But a man who was once a figurehead for society’s poetic outsiders is now proudly recasting himself as brave truth-teller staring defiantly down the barrel of media crucifixion and cancel culture, saying what ‘everyone’ is really thinking.
"Love Is On Its Way Out" is an electro-baroque throb redolent of Lana Del Rey or Lorde, albeit filtered through Morrissey’s concern for the death of humanity’s empathy and “the sad rich, hunting down, shooting down elephants and lions”. Now the Single ‘Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know’ berates an unspecified, drug-hungry singer over bursts of ‘90s Garbage electro rock, psychedelic sax solos and choruses of wailing gospel noir from Motown legend Thelma Houston. Playing it safe, both politically and musically, is clearly a thing of Morrissey’s past.
Still, there are reassurances for the Smithsophiles. Johnny Marr-like piano riffs lurk beneath ‘Bobby…’’s electronic quivers and fizzes. The glowering title track is built on the same sort of heel-click rhythms as "Frankly, Mr Shankly" and "Girlfriend In A Coma" in "What Kind Of People Live In These Houses?" wittily imagines the sad, dull lives of the suburban sheep to the tune of a classic country folk jangle. That track is bedecked with some prime Moz wordplay: “What carpet-chewer lights up this sewer? / And which rough-trade strangers flail around these chambers?”. ‘Knockabout World’ places one of Moz’s euphoric swells of sunburst victimisation (“They kicked to kill you… They tried to turn you into a public target”) atop icy ‘80s beats reminiscent of Yazoo’s ‘Only You’.
Unfortunately, things slacken off sharply in the album’s back end. ‘Darling, I Hug The Pillow’, with its cheesy Mariachi trumpets, stuck-on squelches and Wedding Present-on-downers vibe, goes nowhere slowly. ‘Once I Saw The River Clean’ is what you might get if you programmed a 1970s AI to write a Morrissey song – a tale of walking around a windswept Manchester with his grandmother to buy 20 fags and a T Rex single, getting change from a quid and playing by some graves. And ‘The Secret Of Music’ is nigh-on eight minutes of plodding avant garde crankiness accompanied by disjointed phrases (“I am out-of-tune violin“, “pan-pipes save a life”, “fat bassoon clears the room”).
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