Album Review Friday

#10 Couldn’t Stand The Weather - Stevie Ray Vaughan

#9 Let It Be - The Replacements

#8 Learning To Crawl - The Pretenders

#7 The Smiths

Context is key to understanding why the albums on this list were so powerful in 1984, which lends understanding to why their brilliance continues.  1984 was the year of Van Halen,  Footloose, Duran Duran and ZZ Top.  Nothing but over the top gloss seemed to get attention and popular praise.  Yet somehow a band with an intentional bland name and a socially awkward frontman set its debut album against this glitz to make music history.  The Smiths, four overly self conscious lads from Manchester, England produced a fully formed sound that would be too short lived, but still ring as relevant and unique thirty years later.  Their self-titled debut album The Smiths featured a mature sound strengthened by the emotional vocals of Morrissey and the chiming guitar sounds of Johnny Marr.  This duo would burnout four years later, but the music they created survives.  

Manchester in the 1980s was the English analogue to Seattle in the 1990s.  Spurred by unemployment and a dying economy, the youth of Northern England took their anger and angst out in music, which for pop fans was a bounty of creativity.  Joy Division, New Order, ABC and others would mark the beginning of the period, anchored in the mid-80s by The Smiths and The Stone Roses, all setting the foundation for a scene that would give birth to Oasis in the 1990s.  The Smiths’ origin story is one so often heard in rock, the chance meeting of two gifted artists, invigorated by a common love for alternative bands and the New York punk scene of the 1970s.  Shortly after, slowed by finding the right rhythm section, Morrissey and Marr joined forces with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce and the band was formed.  Morrissey had now decided to only go by his surname, and also is credited with the intentional simplicity of the name of their group: 

“it was the most ordinary name and I thought it was time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces”

Their debut album The Smiths, released February 1984, would be anything but ordinary.  Everything from Marr’s guitar sound to Morrissey’s songwriting would get attention, and not all of it positive.  Certainly an album of murky songs all around four-minutes plus in length, steeped in dark, sexually ambiguous undertones is not a formula that would predict popular success.  “Reel Around The Fountain”, the album’s first track, is not the typical song meant to grab the listener and announce a band’s arrival.  Six minutes of dreamy memories of a sexual experience gone bad do not often bode well, but there is something catchy in Morrissey’s crooning and the song definitively works.  This theme of sexual frustration and confusion continues, as seen in the daringly titled “Pretty Girls Make Graves”.  Again we hear Morrissey describe an awkward situation of adolescent love, sex and denial.  The song works so well though with his lilting delivery and the strength of the backing of Joyce and Rourke. Marr’s guitar work is front and center on the controversial ‘lullaby’ “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle”.  Marr’s consistent, ringing guitar work backs Morrissey’s haunting lyrics that imply a plot of childhood murder.  Looking back now we know this is the band that would write about the pleasure of being killed by in bus accident, and the conflict of seeing a girlfriend in a coma.  But for a debut album to contain lyrics that are this chilling, the music better be extraordinary to pull it off.  

                                                A piano plays in an empty room

                                                There’ll be blood on the cleaver tonight

                                                And when darkness lifts and the room is bright

                                                I’ll still be by your side

                                                For you are all that matters

                                                And I’ll love you to the day I die

                                                There never need be longing in your eyes

                                                As long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine

And it is, and that is what made this album so attractive.  The subject matter was difficult, but the music and vocals conveyed a universal appeal to the themes of struggle, despair and sadness.  That they could put a song out with such sincerity as “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle”, and follow it with the pure pop treat  “This Charming Man” shows The Smiths’ true talent.  Marr’s guitar is bright and fun, betraying Morrissey’s tale of sexual confusion, lust, and vulnerability.  

But the most controversy, and anger, would be directed at the closing track “Suffer Little Children”.  Clearly describing the horrific Moors murders that occurred near Manchester in the 1960s, the song actually led to the album being banned from several stores throughout England.  Despite the subject matter, the song again is a beautiful example of Morrissey’s skill as a vocalist matched with the unique guitar work of Marr.  This combination led to even better music to come, but albeit for only four more years.  Marr and Morrissey could not overcome their creative conflicts, which ran deep enough that their mutual anger continues three decades later.   

The Smiths is ranked on too many lists to mention, be it greatest albums of the 1980s, best debut albums of all time, and on and on.  This is all well deserved, and on reexamination the music and songwriting seems to improve with age.  If only we all could be so fortunate.