First of all, before I start the review, I want to apologise (to anyone who might be checking this blog regularly, which I realise is probably not many) for my recent absence on the blogging front. I moved house a couple of weeks ago and got distracted with that and other stuff over the last month, which along with writer’s block didn’t do great things for my blog plans. I’m getting back on the wagon now though, and I’ll try my best to keep things a little less erratic from now on!

To get myself back into all this writing malarkey, I thought I’d start off with something that’s definitely caught my attention over the last few weeks- Morrissey’s new album, World Peace Is None of Your Business, which was officially released on Monday 14th of July. I talked briefly about my love for Moz in my first post, and thought that now I’ve listened to the album multiple times and really had time to think about it, this release would be perfect for writing my first music review. The review is written on a track-by-track basis—because I’m pedantic and like to waffle—but I’ll be summarising my general thoughts and overall verdict at the end of the post, so skip to that bit if you want a TLDR. My ‘best bits’ of each track will be the bits in red. Also, I’ve never written any kind of music review before, so please be gentle!

1 ‘World Peace Is None of Your Business’

The record’s unabashedly political opening number begins with drums, bells, tribal beats, and…wait, is that a digeridoo? It’s certainly not a standard combination of instruments for a Morrissey song, but the musical inventiveness is a sign of good things to come on the rest of the album. The booming instrumental overture then segues into an anthemic pastiche of how the world’s population are, for the most part, encouraged to accept political and social injustices without questioning them, with Morrissey faux-admonishing those “poor little fools” for their impertinence. It’s an infectious, powerful opener, and Morrissey’s signature soaring vocal melodies are fully intact here.

“World peace is none of your business So would you kindly keep your nose out? The rich must profit and get richer While the poor must stay poor”

2 ‘Neal Cassady Drops Dead’

On this one, Morrissey indulges his love of the theatrical and the vaguely obscure. The opening notes are a ‘Starlight-Express’-worthy twinkle, before breaking into crunchy, almost industrial staccato chords. He sings, variously, of Allen Ginsberg’s reactions to his titular lover’s death (including the surreal masterstroke of his tears shampooing his beard) and of panic over childhood disease, the latter section even sounding like a rap in places. The song’s musical and lyrical diversity is indeed one of its great strengths, and whilst its rock sensibility might have blended into vague aggressive fuzz on 2009’s Years of Refusal, Joe Chiccarelli’s crisp production allows these strengths to come to the fore. One of my favourite moments was Morrissey’s questioning of the listener, imploring them to decide: “Victim or life’s adventurer- which of the two are you?” It’s one of those lyrics that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go.

“Neal Cassady drops dead And Allen Ginsberg’s howl becomes a growl”

3 ‘I’m Not A Man’

This is probably one of my favourite songs on the album. It’s theatrical and builds to a gorgeous crescendo as Morrissey lists and discards masculine archetypes and tropes, from the Don Juan figure through meat-eating and military service. I could have definitely done without the almost 2-minute introductory soundscape; it’s totally excessive and kind of a block of nothingness, which slows the rhythm of the album down where the tracks should be effortlessly leading from one to the other. Disregarding that, though, it’s a well-executed and mostly elegant attack on traditional machismo, and its climax exemplifies Morrissey’s ever-growing vocal powers; there’s even some falsetto in there!

“True grit, true blue Kill-crazy, so very manly of you! You are the soldier Who won’t get much older”

4 ‘Istanbul’

This one is a classic Morrissey piece of storytelling. It traces a regretful father as he searches for his lost son in the Turkish city, and the diverse instrumentation and ever-changing melodies- at once frantic and mellow- perfectly evoke urban chaos and intrigue. Of Morrissey’s past work it reminds me the most of ‘Jack the Ripper’ in tone, but there’s a much more definite and evocative story here. He has an eye for plaintive tragedy, and ‘Istanbul’s final line- where the father discovers the coffin and corpse of his son- is devastating.

“Rolling breathless off the tongue The vicious street-gang slang I lean into a box of pine Identify the kid as mine”

5 ‘Earth Is the Loneliest Planet’

This was the first disappointment of the album for me. It’s musically enjoyable thanks to the return to Moz’s much-loved flamenco stylings, however it’s essentially filler. It is very much standard Morrissey-by-numbers fare, a complaint about loneliness in the modern world, but it feels hollow and lyrically uninventive. It could have been successfully swapped out for ‘One of Our Own’, a far superior B-side found on World Peace’s deluxe edition, and it’s a shame that the previous run of great songs was broken by such a formulaic track. He can do so much better than this.

“You’re in the wrong skin And the skin that you’re in Says, oh, let it begin”

6 ‘Staircase at the University’

Thank heavens, then, that he rapidly redeems himself on the next track. ‘Staircase at the University’ is a real standout, reminiscent of 1992’s ‘The National Front Disco’ but with a Smiths-esque sensibility that’s been missing from Morrissey’s music recently. He’s in storytelling mode again, this time with the tale of a university student so cowed from academic and parental pressure that she throws herself down the stairs. Tragic, yes, but it’s also really fucking catchy, replete with drums, horns, strings, hand-claps and a soaring melody that verges on euphoric. Morrissey is one of those rare artists who at his best can simultaneously make you want to dance and cry, and this track exemplifies that perfectly, as well as the album’s overall light touch. It’s hard to imagine the line “she threw herself down and her head split three ways” being more singable than it is here. Uptempo and summery-sounding though it may be, the dark core of the song is the trivialisation and dismissal of the deceased protagonist’s growing anxiety, and its catchiness, ironically enough, underscores that perfectly.

“Crammin’, jammin’, pack ‘em in, rammin’ Chocka-block box, power-study, polish up And if it breaks your heart then don’t come running to me”.

7 ‘The Bullfighter Dies’

Morrissey retreads his much-loved animal rights ground here, but this is no ‘Meat Is Murder’- the puns in the verses keep it light, but it’s a pretty insubstantial track and one that, like ‘Earth Is the Loneliest Planet’, would have worked better as a B-side. I enjoyed the instrumentation, along with Moz’s extension of the word ‘cries’ into several almost yodelling phrases, but its overly simplistic nature means that it’s probably the song I skip the most when listening to the album. So much so, in fact, that I’m really at a loss at what else to say about it. The message is solid, but I’m not enamoured with the execution.

“Mad in Madrid Ill in Seville Lonely in Barcelona”

8 ‘Kiss Me A Lot’

This riff on the Mexican bolero tune ‘Besáme Mucho’ (in title at least) is simple but fun. The lyrics are perhaps a little blunt and obvious, but the song is saved by wonderful music and vocal work. It’s extremely catchy, a surge of carefree passion and affection backed by rising and falling horn rhythms, and would have made a great single if only for its infectiousness. In the slightly bland chug-rock setting and production of Years of Refusal it could have been unbearably heavy-handed, however it just about works here as one of the lighter tracks on the album.

“Bastille, mausoleum Stockyard, churchyard, your Mammy’s back yard I don’t care when or where”

9 ‘Smiler With Knife’

The album shifts dramatically in tone as it enters its final third. Morrissey sings his first few phrases, inviting his assailant-slash-lover to “see in me the side of you that sometimes makes you jump with fright, almost acappella, backed only by a single gentle acoustic guitar. His velvety baritone really shines in this sparse musical setting, recalling the more intimate moments of 1994’s Vauxhall and I. After the calm opening, the song breaks in and out of balladic drama, providing a perfect backdrop to its at times Freudian (the phallic nature of the knife as a symbol, anyone? Ooh-er) meditations on sex and death. Morrissey’s delivery is by turns mournful, seductive and at times vaguely menacing. It’s a beautiful track which reinforces and ramps up a notch World Peace’s underlying theme of mortality. It gives me chills.

“Surrendered will I am before you I am sick to death of life Smiler with knife, alight” “Time has frittered, long and slow All I am and was will go But where to, and why now?”

10 ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle’

Here, Morrissey urges a friend to escape from impending marital entrapment against an ominous synth organ backing and a ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’-quoting chorus. This track reminds me greatly of The Divine Comedy’s album Fin De Siecle in its melodrama and instrumentation, and the theatrical mode Morrissey seems to have adopted on World Peace as a whole is firmly in place as he derides the lazy titular bride. ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle’ has met with concern from some quarters about possible misogyny in the lyrics, however personally I think the descriptions of a spouse who “just wants a slave to break his back in pursuit of a living wage” reflects more on Moz’s views on marriage and oppressive relationships in general than any derision of women as a group. It’s melodic, scathing, and overall a pretty decent track.

“You’re that stretch of the beach That the tide doesn't reach No meaning, no reason The lonely season”

11 ‘Mountjoy’

The penultimate track on World Peace takes its name from a Dublin prison which opened in 1850, moving from the metaphorical imprisonment of marriage in ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle’ to the literal imprisonment of incarceration. The industrial sound effects that pepper the simple chord progressions are strongly evocative of the slam of prison doors, creating a claustrophobic ambience matched by the cynical lyrics. Morrissey utilises the context of a place where “human sewage sweats” to create an extended metaphor about the futility and struggles of life, in a much more elegant manner than ‘Earth is the Loneliest Planet’ could hope to manage- “what those in power do to you reminds you at a glance that humans hate eachothers guts, and show it given the chance”. It’s a sobering thought, made even more so when we’re reminded of the equalising nature of entrapment, that, ultimately, “we all lose, rich or poor”. It’s bleak stuff, but beautifully executed and has become one of my favourite songs on the record.

“A swagger hides the fear in here By this rule we breathe And there is no-one on this earth Who I’d feel sad to leave”

12 ‘Oboe Concerto’

‘Oboe Concerto’, the final track on the album proper, continues the downtempto nature of the preceding three songs. It’s a melancholy meditation on the inevitability of death, as Morrissey proclaims that “all the best ones are dead”. Like on ‘Smiler With Knife’, his vocals sound effortless here, melodically calling back to Strangeways, Here We Come’s ‘Death of a Disco Dancer’. The closing refrain of “round, round, the rhythm of life goes round” emphasises an inescapably cyclical fate, drawing our attention to the spectre of mortality that seems to hang over the whole record, and it’s a great note to end it on.

“Oboe concerto All I do is drink to absent friends And there’s a song I can’t stand And it’s stuck in my head”

General Thoughts

To summarise, then, I really enjoyed this album. There were some weaker moments lyrically that feel phoned in, but for the most part it’s a great return to form and feels completely cohesive. The unobtrusive production and creative instrumentation make for a much more subtle record than World Peace’s predecessor Years of Refusal, but without the overly polished, occasionally sterile feel I often get from 2004’s You Are the Quarry. The choice of subject matter is inventive, and although it is often dark, the overall light touch of this album makes it Morrissey’s most Smithsonian record since the early 90s.

Verdict: 8.5/10 (told you I was pedantic!)