My Review: Morrissey - Speedway

 My Review 

Morrissey - Speedway

A pole.

A wall.

A defence.

And if you think about it, it's all about wanting to be the effective attack that has the desired effect.

It is the decadence of a feeling that is increasingly being enlarged.

There are embankments to be conquered, with a hard and insensitive skin, as further support in this destructive phase.

Then there is Morrissey, the poet whose mind is always full of black waves and whose stocks are running low, but still resistant.

Who has the faithful look of someone who can promise loyalty to himself, till the last drop of his strength.

In his album Vauxhall and I, he decides that death and human defeat are worthy of his pen, of his voice that is increasingly inclined to cling to pain and to describe decadence with its splendid and at the same time atrocious irony.

Here then that the pole, the wall, the defence are the perfect instruments of his involvement in events that have wounded and upset him.

But it is precisely from the attacks he has suffered that the poet from Stretford has built his anti-atomic bunker, with wheels...

Yes, because his is not a passive defence and he decides to take it outside, in that world that is now so inhospitable to him.

And in the cellar of his defence, in the last visible and audible location he places Speedway, the electric saw and the hammer that will make him triumph.

Joylessly.

One is shocked by the way his old peculiar feature, dating back to The Smiths (deep lyrics over music that may not be heavy), is here consigned to the past.

It is time for an atmosphere that is a nail as rusty and taut as his voice, as his words, for a compact whole that can make his inner scream unmistakable. 

And when you are surrounded by so much sadness, by protests that become sharp tears, you can only fall to the ground knowing that it will be his own hand that will tell you that "In my own strange way

I've always been true to you" and pull you to his side. 

A mysterious act in which we find ourselves first condemned and then saved by him. 

But this is his root, his inseparable core, to which many may find it difficult to be faithful.

And this is not a song, an artistic creation that can lead to a series of reflections.

Absolutely not.

Speedway is the laceration that becomes sound with a minimal but impetuous melody, a journey into his wounds to which he gives access for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds of pure amniotic delirium, because this atmosphere seems to come from the womb of a deep suffering, which always fertilises itself...

An electric current should bring light, strength, it should help, console, fortify, remove fear.

And only in Speedway all this happens while also bringing its opposite, generating a massive series of surrendered and swampy forces, like a slime that fattens despair.

The song is definitely a manifestation of how the private sphere coincides with the public one, in a courageous act of demonstration in which the aim is to show that one's vulnerability does not mean surrendering helplessly to the enemy.

And that in reality it is even greater than it is supposed to be.

But within its boundaries there are impenetrable coffers. 

It starts with his inspiration and then meets guitars with nails waiting to become bloody.

An electric saw displaces, stuns and makes us restless souls.

Everything sounds unique and majestic from the start, in this downward increase, as if every contradiction should find its place in the music and the words.

Between e-bow and the rhythmic electric guitar and the bass as the faithful squire of the sonic mystery, Morrissey for his part decides to fix his criticism, irony and wind of madness forever in melancholic vocals with clenched teeth, gnashing, coughing up with elegance the impurities that have tried to intoxicate him.

And it is a race that sets out to leave us behind, to defeat us, to let us know that the coat in which he has closed himself forever will never be reached.

They are words like an earthquake that wants to be gentle: out of politeness, because after all, no wound of his can become gratuitous violence. 

There is no need for him to turn up the volume at all: the words do it, the drumming does it, stopping for a moment, amplifying the sense of free fall into which the song throws us without ever making us doubt. 

It's a continuous punch with his wounded knuckles giving us weeping blood but not prone to self-pity.

And that electric saw is a dagger that remains in our ears, constantly, even in its absence.

It is an almost total confession: the certainty remains that something is left inside him. The then 35-year-old Morrissey showed that his wisdom and propulsive ability to bring out anger could co-exist, to get straight to our hearts.

The guitars of Alan Whyte and Boz Boorer are the waterfall that freezes the skin, Jonny Bridgwood's bass is a sponge full of water that empties into Woodie Taylor's powerful drumming, for a song with a dense, chaotic, poignant, tribal ending.

A track that concludes the album in a funereal way: it almost seems as if he blows out every candle in our lives one by one, revealing reality to us, to make us get used to the darkness that he is already consciously living in.

Everything is one long lightning bolt that explodes in a thunderclap that finds its apotheosis in the final drumming, shattering the senses devastated by his words.

This union of lyrics and music ultimately turns out to be the testament of a period that ended with this song: at that time he was contemplating his departure from the scene, but it was with these words and musical notes that we knew the farewell would be postponed. 

Perhaps it remains his most resounding and devastating song, but it is not a cause for jubilation or celebration: it is a hearse born of those lightning bolts turned to thunder.

And even today our ears and minds ache because the poet no longer has gladioli in his pockets, but the turbulent phenomena of the sky...

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

March 7 2022

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/speedway-2014-remaster/859942535?i=859942556

https://open.spotify.com/track/7wVwKqDtZ5EZHghJ82XGw9?si=IGL63--RQm2vz2ylOaXxiQ