Twenty-First Century Still Breathing Down Morrissey's Neck

After a few years, many artists come out with compilation CDs comprised of all those rarities and B-Sides that didn't make it into the more widely released albums. Sometimes these CDs can be veritable banquets, full of wonderful, insightful and delicious snippets hidden on the flip-side of an artist's career.

This is not the case with Morrissey's My Early Burglary Years. I cringingly suspect that someone in marketing at Time Warner thought he'd release a new Morrissey CD, whether Morrissey had anything good left or not. It looks like someone raided the depths of the freezer and made a 16 course meal out of two-year-old freezer-burned chicken and crystallized Chinese takeout.

Which isn't to say that some people don't like freezer-burned chicken. A few pieces on this CD are downright edible. The rest, however, should have been tossed out last spring.

The music is recognizably Morrissey's, as sardonic, ironic and melodic as ever.

But, with the exception of a few refreshing numbers, the songs are lacking. The tracks on this album weren't in general release, and for a good reason--they're not very good.

"Cosmic Dancer" shows both the potential and the mediocrity of the CD as a whole.

It's the only really live track on the album, and it offers a rare glimpse of Morrissey's voice pre-studio refinement. For Morrissey fans it makes for fascinating listening--his voice has never been as versatile and expressive. It's also quite sexy, as the constantly screaming fans in the background emphasize. The talent is there--but the song itself is crap. A guitar in the background chokes out basic chords with an simple Natalie Imbruglia-esque rhythm as Morrissey churns out such drivel as "I danced myself out of the womb...Is it strange to dance so soon?....What's it like to be a loon?... I liken it to a balloon." Gag. Is Morrissey washed up? Say it ain't so.

The encouraging showcase of the CD is the A side "Sunny." In true Morrissey style the song takes its time cadencing, but once the beat begins the song is infectious. The trademark maudlin Morrissey irony is apparent from the start--the band strikes up in the most driving, happy manner possible, as Morrissey sings of heroine addiction and "the needle pressed on to tight skin" (The song is rumored to be about Jake Walters, Morrissey friend and former personal assistant). Consuming depression has never had such a foot-tapping beat. It's a guilty pleasure. "Sunny" is an excellent song, most rewarding in its stimulation of the memories of what Morrissey once was. Listening to it, however, is a reminder of how much uniformly better Morrissey was back when he headed The Smiths. Alas, the music world will never find a song like "How Soon is Now" again, at least not from the solo Morrissey.

"I've Changed my Plea to Guilty" is symptomatic of Morrissey's unsuccessful departure from his more rewarding roots. A Tori Amos wannabe crudely whales chord progressions in the background while Morrissey croons about "emotional air-raids" and the like. One can imagine Morrissey the ex-diva, a martini in his hand, reclining on the piano in a seedy bar, bemoaning his existence. Oh, Morrissey, you're brooding enough already--give us a beat to leave the ballads to the groomed women in the Top 40 who know what they are doing.

The miserable complacence of "I've Changed my Plea to Guilty" is mercifully kicked into high gear with the sugary, jumping "The Boy Racer." That melodious negative energy is back. "Boy racer; We're going to kill this pretty thing" has such pretty musical packaging that homicide seems lined up right with rainbows and lollipops. Morrissey is not a happy man, no. But this song is candy. It has all the elements of the glory days; ambiguous sexuality, ironic self-awareness and a morose premise.

My early Burglary Years is also an enhanced CD--it comes with some bonus multi-media. Before you go out and buy that new Morrissey-monogrammed CD-Rom, however, beware: the "bonus" sucks. Only the most avid Morrissey fan could find pleasure in watching the grainy video for "Sunny" (No wonder why the video was never released...). Ostensibly shot with a camcorder, the video shows three people in Victoria Park, London, laughing and smiling throughout robberies and domestic violence. A young woman kisses the man who robbed her.

Well, come to think of it, the video fits fairly well with Morrissey's paradoxical music. Like the CD, it's still Morrissey, it's just not very good.