Morrissey "Kill Uncle" Review NME

BETTER RELATE THAN NEVER

MORRISSEY

Kill Uncle (HMV/All formats)

WELCOME BACK, Mozzer. Three years in an absurd wilderness of his own making have done sod all for Morrissey's reputation as someone to be taken seriously and a lot for his image as Mr Flaming Pillock.

On the few occasions he gave interviews, Morrissey chose to present himself as arrogant, self-obsessed and depressed. Not much new there, except he wasn't funny anymore. In the meantime, he released singles from which invention, melody and the old Moz trick of having something interesting to say had nipped out to the corner shop with no intention of returning. 'November Spawned A Monster', 'Interesting Drug', 'Ouija Board Ouija Board', 'Piccadilly Palare' - a quartet of duller records has not been released in such numbing succession since the last days of Johnny Hates Jazz.

If ever there was a man who had lost his way, his interest in making music, or possibly his will to live, it was Morrissey. But by immense good fortune for the known universe, Moz suddenly decided to write with Mark Nevin, the one with the hat in Fairground Attraction. This meant that there was a chance that Morrissey might actually make a good record; and if he didn't, it would effectively be goodbye too old grumbleguts forever.

So Moz and Nevin went off and worked together. And the result of their unlikely labour is 'Kill Uncle', the first longish new Morrissey product since 1987. Produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley and played on by Nevin, Andrew Paresi and ex-Madness man Bedders, 'Kill Uncle' is a somewhat underweight 33 minutes of music. It's got one rather long song and a couple of very short ones. And it's pretty good. Nevin and occasional writer Langer have cured us of Morrissey/Rourke Disease and written flaming melodies for Mr Music.

They have put nagging hooks and memorable arrangements in places where once the band merely plodded on to the next verse. And in this context Morrissey does what we expect of him, some things we don't expect of him and pop music raises its standard triumphantly over the corpse of 'Ouija Board Ouija Board'.

The predictable stuff is the least good. There's '(I'm) The Last Of The Family Line' - once you've heard the title, you've heard the song - with irritating Moz lines like "I arrive/With incredible style" which wouldn't be funny even if you were drunk. There's a self-pitying song about being fancied by someone who isn't a schemer ('Found Found Found') but it stomps like the very devil and it has bass guitar the size of Scotland on it. And we have the rather splendidly final (in both senses of the word) track 'There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends' with its sarcasm and anger-dripping lyric (“All that we hope is that when we go" croons Morrissey, "Our skin and our blood and our bones don't get in your way/Making you ill the way they did when we lived") and churchy piano.

Everything else leaves the production line with a bang. 'Our Frank' you may well have heard, with its mess of riffing guitars like a sudden shower of spears and incredibly unpleasant lyric about vomiting on pullovers. It is a cousin of thunder and a sister to the remarkable 'Mute Witness', wherein the guitars wail and crash like the Pixies on amyl nitrate, the piano clatters like some old Sparks tracks, a keyboard goes "oh ah oh ah" and Morrissey sings a Twin Peaks-like vignette of a woman standing on a table and pointing to a frisbee.

With the possible exception of the five minute chord-grinding and fairly self-explanatory 'The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye', Morrissey allows compassion to rear its be-quiffed head too. 'Driving Your Girlfriend Home' is a short story of pain and 'Asian Rut' is classically bonkers. Only Morrissey could have decided to answer critics by writing a song where an Asian teenager attempts to revenge his best friend's death and is murdered by English boys, the whole shebang set to a funeral march with grim violin stylings top it. The pudding is nearly over-egged, but not quite.

So 'Kill Uncle' is a collection of songs that are both very good and like nothing much else in pop. They range every which way across styles and themes and still they sound like only Morrissey could have sung them. 'Kill Uncle' bodes immensely well for the future, not least because this is the first Moz album where half the songs are about someone other than himself. It also indicates to all but the dimmest that a Smiths reunion is about as useful and relevant to anyone's life as a Yell! reunion.

For now, things are great Moz-wise and all we need is a world tour, a few happy smiles and another top album which has actually got 45 minutes of music on it and we will all be in paradise together. (8)

David Quantick