Smiths "Meat is Murder" review

TOP OF THE CHOPS

HE SMITHS

Meat Is Murder (Rough Trade)

THAT NATURAL Northern charm, bred in the back-to-backs and cobblestone alleyways, shyly smiling, quipping couplets of love forlon and bungled romance, over those infectiously syncopated rhythms. All this can only mean one man . . .

Yes, George Formby.

However, it’s not George we’re here for, but a man who’s declared an admiration for the Lancashire minstrel and could arguably be seen as his successor. Steven Patrick Morrissey and his popular Smiths band return with this their second 'proper' album, following last year’s incandescent debut and the intermediary 'Hatful Of Hollow’ compilation job. At the least, 'Meat Is Murder’ equals its illustrious predecessors. Given some growing time, it could even better them.

Lyrically, these nine new tracks display the Bard of Whalley Range at his most direct. Disciplined and succinct, each song relates an affecting tale or makes a point with killing precision. Musically, writer Johnny Marr contributes a clutch of his best melodies yet, plus some of that captivating and thoughtful guitar work which moves a number like 'How Soon Is Now’ into major league greatness.

It’s not as if the words and music sound 'made for each other’: they don’t. Of course, they don’t clash or contradict, they simply work independently of each other. Morrissey’s singing preserves a quality of solitude; the instruments and voice operate in eerie detachment, but often to beautiful effect. Morrissey and Marr don’t so much sink their talents into one as give you two for the price of one.

Thus the opener, 'The Headmaster Ritual’: Marr constructs a lengthy, intricately-patterned intro, vaguely Beatle-ish. Eventually, practically at random, the vocals float forward to slap you about the head: “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools/Spineless swines, cemented minds”. Next, on 'Rusholme Ruffians’, Morrissey sounds pushed to keep himself abreast of a brisk, rockabilly-skiffle beat.

Both songs deal with the violence that runs in a malevolent undercurrent through the album, spilling to the surface amid the abbatoir gore of the final and title track 'Meat Is Murder’. It’s as if the slaughter we inflict on animals is just the crudest expression of the subtler thuggery employed in humans’ everyday dealings with one another. This, admittedly, is not very reminiscent of George Formby.

Morrissey, though, walks through the mess with his sentimental vision intact. 'Rusholme Ruffians’ is a story about “the last night of the fair”, a setting forever redolent of sex and violence in the English teenage imagination. Sure enough, a boy is stabbed, a schoolgirl falls suicidally in love with a greasy-haired speedway operator. And Morrissey is the boy who walks home alone, but his “faith in love is still devout”.

'I Want The One I Can’t Have’ touches a common chord of poignant frustration; this story is of a doomed infatuation for some local homicidal juvenile. 'What She Said’ is bleaker yet, about the lost and lonely girl who smokes because she’s “hoping for an early death”. The latter cut also boasts a storming guitar attack your average metal guitarist would rip off his chest wig to emulate. I shall expect a Johnny Marr pin-up pic in Kerrang! or cancel my subscription forthwith.

Over Mike Joyce’s sombre, rolling drumbeat, 'That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ is a plaintive accoustical lament, with Morrissey once more offering himself up for adoption as patron saint of bedsit depressives, yet with a realism which defies pastiche.

Side two starts with an example of Morrissey’s knack of snapping you back to attention with an arresting line. “I’d like to drop my trousers to the world’” he declares, while the boys in the band avert their gaze and get stuck in to serious rock’n’roll.

'Well I Wonder’ and 'Barbarism Begins At Home’ (the latter a savage swipe at the taking of savage swipes at young children) are perhaps the plainest Smiths fare on this record. Just occasionally, the group are Smiths by nature as well as name, serving up standard rock with more efficiency than inspiration. Closing 'Barbarism’, Andy Rourke’s funkoid bass work-out is aimless in the context of an otherwise tightly-paced LP.

But it does supply some breathing-space before the stark, climactic 'Meat Is Murder’. Farmyard sounds and sinister mechanical noises bookend this chilling, funereal essay on killing and eating animals. To a death-march tempo, Morrissey compresses sadness and anger: “Kitchen aromas aren’t very homely... it’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench/Of Murder”. Pop propaganda has rarely come so powerful.

What difference will it make? Not a sausage, so far as my diet goes I’m afraid, yet the roast beef of Old England will never taste quite so good again. I’m sure that many wavering recruits to the vegetarian cause will be won over. Whatever, on that track and the record as a whole, The Smiths’ artistic achievement is genuinely beyond doubt. As a unit, they’ve never sounded so sure, so confident, while Johnny Marr is certain to emerge from the relative neglect that’s been his lot till now.

Naturally, the personality of Morrissey will remain basic to The Smiths’ appeal. We afford him the sort of licence that’s normally only extended to children and idiots, sensing the presence of an innocence and simplicity that’s been civilised out of the rest of us, and a kind of insight also. The deaf-aids, the flowers, the NHS specs, they’re all the trappings of an artful vulnerability.

Turned out nice again, hasn’t it? George Formby always said that.

Paul Du Noyer