It’s only been a few months since the last Smiths album, so Mozzer must have been working on this during the recording of Strangeways Here We Come. Quite a lot of it sounds, unsurprisingly, like a Smiths song minus Johnny Marr, especially Suedehead with its dose of jangly guitar that isn't quite as good as Marr - I felt his absence throughout this album.
Guitar instead is by Vin Reilly who is fine in his own right - he does some nice scratchy James Honeyman-Scott kind of acidic guitar on Alsatian Cousin. The best musical addition to Morrissey’s typical dry and acerbic lyrics, however, comes from the strings arrangements of Fenella Barton. She and her team turn Angel Down We Go Together into an Eleanor Rigby sound, but where they really elevate a track is Every Day Is Like Sunday.
For me this is probably Morrissey’s best song, ever. Morrissey’s grumpy lyrics about “the seaside town that they forgot to bomb” perfectly encapsulates the desperate grinning face that masks the misery of British coastal resorts, the arcade where you can “win a cheap tray”, the chippies where you can “share a grease tea with me” (although no mention of aggressive seagulls divebombing you for the chips), all wrapped up in strings that provide pizzicato emphasis in places and soar elsewhere; gorgeous.
Morrissey closes out the album with some full-on political satire, a fantasy about the end of Thatcher with Margaret On The Guillotine - “People like you make me feel so old inside”. Yeah. There's a few of those around as I write as well. It turns into a bit of gentle acoustic folkiness (guitar is probably Stephen Street), akin to Richard & Linda Thompson, before ending abruptly with the Shunk! of a guillotine.
It’s not as good, I think, as Strangeways, but it has its moments. It feels to me like the album is Every Day Is Like Sunday plus some other tracks that fail to match that.
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