Morrissey

It might just be the distorted looking glass of the last 20 years, but there’s something about the 1980s and its music that brings to mind the Atlantic City casinos built in that decade. The casinos aspire to grandeur—domed, cream ceilings, great pseudo-classical columns, golden moldings—and yet are undone by the very beginning of paint peel, the first sag of the ceiling, the discolored hint of water damage from shirking on the plumbing. They might have looked good when they were first built, but they were never built to last. The defects were there from the beginning, but they were covered up by young plaster and the excitement of novelty, by the distraction of the slot machines and the desire not to see beyond the superficial dazzle of it all. Now, there’s nothing left to conceal the flaws.

And Morrissey, the one-time lead singer of 80s superstars, The Smiths, suffers acutely from this exposed condition. No longer the international sex symbol of his twenties, Morrissey’s sexuality is not the burning issue it once may have been. No longer the ringleader of iconoclastic innovators, he’s the frontman for only his overindulged self. No longer politically relevant, he can pontificate on matters of state all he wants, but the papers don’t really care. The persona of Morrissey has lost its allure; there’s nothing to conceal the insufficiency of his music.

His newest attempt, “Years of Refusal,” is overwrought and ill-conceived, the result of a warped ego that has not yet realized its time has come and gone. Morrissey’s voice has morphed into something wholly unsuitable for the roaring guitars that make up his instrumental bed. Like floorboards, driven apart over the years by heat and humidity, there’s a divide between the vocals and the instrumentation. Morrissey has given in entirely to his natural tendency to caramel crooning, and, nearly always stalled in throaty vibrato, sounds more like a second-rate Broadway singer than a rock star. Gone is the occasional roughness, the edge of the lead singer of the Smiths, a thinness that emphasized the honeyed richness of his voice even more. Now it’s incessantly cloying and sickly sweet all of the time.

But even as he’s aged, he’s clung to his heavy electric guitars. There’s swirling distortion in “Mama Lay Softly On the Riverbed” that clashes with the vocals and squeezed-in synthesized organ. “All You Need is Me” ultimately manages to harmonize Morrissey’s fussy vocals with the backing guitars, but only after the initially heavy instrumentation is abandoned for lighter fare. Morrissey’s voice, thankfully, never duels with the powerful, profound chords, and he’s free to embellish his autobiographical quips—“I was a small fat child in a welfare house / There was only one thing I dreamed about / Fate has just handed it to me”—with his whole range of vocal contortions.

Morrissey’s pseudo-intellectual musings are also somehow unbecoming of so mature an individual. “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore,” a slow ballad that recounts the harsh words of a jaded man to his soon-to-be-discarded lover (“It’s not your birthday anymore / There’s no need to be kind to you”), comes off as juvenile and pitiless. “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell” makes use of end-rhymes that can only be described as puerile: “And the smiling children tell you that you smell / Well, just look at me / A savage beast, I got nothing to see / And when I die I want to go to hell.”

And yet, like gambling, there’s something addictive about Morrissey’s new CD, no matter how bad you know it is. Every song seems to have a few bars that hit it just right, as if the old Smiths star shines through the fat every now and then. One of the high points is the chorus of “That’s How People Grow Up,” where Morrissey’s tenor tremors in sync with the sinister riffs. “Throwing My Arms Around Paris” is the one track that makes good use of lyrical pretension in its resonant declaration of lovelorn-fueled wanderlust: “I’m throwing my arms around Paris because only stone and steel accept my love.”

These moments keep you listening, like small wins at the craps table. You keep listening because you think you might just win, that Morrissey might all of sudden stiffen his beer-sodden body and pull himself together again into something of beauty. But that’s the problem, because that’s exactly the logic that keeps fooling the AC’s casino clientele and Morrissey himself. They think that, if only they wish, everything will be as it was in the 80’s. But, sadly for Morrissey (and for those of us who would be his fans), that just is not the case.

—Staff writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.