My review: Morrissey - Vauxhall and I

 My Review:

Morrissey - Vauxhall and I 

A man is a stone that welcomes the sun, the moss, the wind, the rain, the snow, the human brutality, a witness to joy and tragedy, the guardian of everything, mute and capable of welcoming.

Then there is a man who is a poet, an immense, intense gaze, which falls into his pen like a feather even though he has tons of black on his back, since this is his task: to arrive lightly even if burdened, this is his role, to the end.

His name is Morrissey, the sinuous tear that travels through the decades with increasingly cynical, nostalgic, oblique and heavy eyes, but what he eventually gives us has something magical, precious, true that cannot be refused.

Introspective, resigned, pessimistic, he manages with a single verse to give us strength despite this suffocating magma: it is his unquestionable talent, what elevates him onto the winner's stage, where there are no longer gladioli but poisonous thorns.

The most lost of lost souls, incredibly he becomes the only foothold for those who think they are alone and lost. Listening to him you defend your right to life, you stop dying when you feel alive despite depression, even before resurrecting, because his voice and his words make you hold on to the desire for life, even if you look downwards like him.

Morrissey returns with a new bundle of songs, he make us enter into his inner riots, his despairs, his rages to which he has put filters, and, embracing us with his usual kindness, he puts his recent ordeal, his agitated breaths in our hands, with words that know how to cross every obstacle, to fully see that his career is the best way to find ourselves.

An album absolutely capable of showing this poet able to compact his past and to offer us new views, new perspectives for a soul so vast that it is impossible to comprehend and evaluate, because we are left with nothing but adoration for his ability to blend his public and private events and then make us drink sips of a delicious wine. Unique.

Songs that have a recognisable movement but are new at certain moments, surprising for his propensity to put glitter on open wounds: he knows how to paint harmony where there should only be tears. 

There is a man who belongs to himself, who captures everything as if it were oxygen, who manifests only the desire to write and sing about the universe corrupted by melancholies without handbrakes, with the intention of leaving the gift of his testimony to eternity, as a resource on which he first knows few will rely. Perhaps not even he himself, and this makes him intense and credible.

His songs, in this extraordinary Vauxhall and I, make us touch his breaths, his own and those of his torments, and listening to them becomes a swimming inside him, until disappearing.

The bard asks questions, passes sentences sifting through feelings and behaviour, makes noises in our stomach, scratches the dust of habits and, with bravado, distances himself from what oppresses him, building his own hermitage, made of delicate emotional tension, until he slams the door and leaves with his words in his pocket.

With his problems he fills himself and fills our hearts: what the heavens have given him in these songs is a drawing for us to benefit from, to pamper his suffering and give him back what the same heavens have denied him, namely the chance to be like the rest of us.

His vocabulary, always dense with heaps of decadent wisdom, veers towards apotheosis by giving fluorescent images, taming his earthquakes so as not to give in, he who is always just a step away from the precipice.

Together with Viva Hate, this album represents the ability to combine strengths with weaknesses, where his life is not a game but an exasperated crossroads, trafficked by continuous elaborations, experiences that break rocks, make the toxins that would like to ruin the tissues of his beauty cry, failing.

The ability, that comes from The Smiths, to give the voice the role of suspending the leaden meaning embedded in the words with his propensity for a singing that can make tensions float is still intact, magnificent and decisive, kept deliberately alive, at the highest level.

Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer are his two angels, painters of notes and pilots of weaves and rock raids, with that pop face that suits Moz so well. The two of them emerge victorious despite scepticism, cumbersome, distorted and embarrassing comparisons with the story of The Smiths. They have quickly learned to amalgamate undoubted qualities to give Morrissey sound paths in which he feels comfortable, perfectly. Jonny Bridgwood's bass and Woodie Taylor's drums complete the line-up, for an ensemble capable of new harmonic solutions, with a minimal but exemplary arrangement. Steve Lillywhite's production is compact and, like it or not, even superior to that of Mick Ronson in the previous Your Arsenal. No song knows a moment of weakness, of tiredness, but they are always kept alive by the great skill of coating it in light for the most introspective album ever by the Mancunian master.

Sadness seems to be the child of a necessity, not the consequence of disasters (in any case, they happened to him, given the depth of the three losses he experienced of people precious and important to him), and for this reason the purity of a feeling that governs his pulse is confirmed: his are tears that arise from an outpost unknown to us. Like the stars that disappear and leave people widows deprived of their beauty, Morrissey does the same with his songs, which, each time they end, leave one bewildered as one toasts to new episodes because his genius must be celebrated, without fear.

Having found the guiding line of the lyrics, scattered in its golden filaments, his voice obeys the project of pushing it towards tenderness, as if a cuddle could arise from the abyss he shows us in the foreground.

At a time when the guitars of the world were tuned to the din, to the extremes of an emergency devoted to sonic screams, Morrissey's band finds a way to visit melodies, arpeggios, plunges of light that abduct darkness without killing it, leaving Morrissey's lyrics to decide its fate. Songs that move us, make us worry, cross the fear of knowing he is so close to surrender. More mature than when he was considered among the best songwriters of the 90s, in this work he rises to be better than himself, succeeding because, if The Smiths remain unreachable, with this album he can look at his past from the same height, that of the eyes.

A work that exorcises some demons and seems to invite others: there is no peace in his intelligence rummaging through rubbish, where he first struggles to keep himself away from that gesture. Songs like spies, like flashes of wind to probe our capacity for acceptance, in the solitude of a man who has in the microphone the instrument to untie his cross.

What stands out about this fourth record is the impression of a maturity reached to begin a new phase: as if he were able to write the future by singing the present, with guitars drawing the shape of a man increasingly detached from the motions of a system alien to him. The light of his sincerity is so evident that it explodes in his writing aimed at blurring the lie and the badness, not denying but shuffling the cards of his dangerous game.

Morrissey still loves the propensity towards the curse of those who observing and understanding can only bleed, choosing a few friends to find a lonely road where he can focus his sharp displays of class, an actor of the heart who sows relief because he knows how to bring together the fears of all of us, the enchanted spectators with a ready tear. A deep, determined album, the cradle that without handbrake picks up speed to disappear from our gaze. While this listening measures the pulse to his class, we are left with our skin constantly wet, in an emotional fever that anaesthetises the past, and we return to the idea that the bard from Stretford is in better shape than ever, because without filters all his clamour rests on our heart to enchant it to the last note.

We just have to swim through these eleven lanes and learn how to bombard our enemies with his songs...

Song by song

Now My Heart Is Full

Boz Boorer writes music that embraces the ocean, Morrissey puts in it the waves with poignant lyrics which reveal his acquired maturity, while verse and refrain that make love, with even difficult moments, but with his joy, that emerges but certainly cannot be smiling. Born to become the perfect act of love for those who adore this man, without reticence, the song is Morrissey's true hug to us all.

Spring-Heeled Jim

Extraordinary lyrics, Moz plunges us into two stories that seem far apart but manages to amalgamate them perfectly. In a tale where sex does not guarantee love, while it seems more possible that hostility will come instead, here, on the music always by Boorer, Morrissey takes his voice and brings us back to Viva Hate as an approach. The constant crooning keeps the tension burning while the words travel sensually within an event that scratches the skin with this sound wave that, like a sweaty mist, leads us into an Alternative with rock guitars hinted at but always kept at bay.

Billy Budd

Alain Whyte writes a thunder that seems to come out of the lanes of Your Arsenal, with a glam attitude but without renouncing the sick grey distortions on which Master Moz's voice can free itself with its highly recognisable metrics. It becomes the only track that seems out of sync with all the others, but perhaps for this very reason worthy of our full attention. The lyrics, on the other hand, are perfectly aligned with the album's design to make it ultimately irresistible.

Hold On To Your Friends

Alain sketches the melancholic avenue on which Moz's words seem to stroll with the gaze of someone who has understood what is valuable in life. Something funereal hovers giving the track all the power we need to abandon ourselves inside this pop-rock gem capable of uniting the 70s with the 90s with a solo that engraves the air.

The More You Ignore The Closer I Get

Morrissey in a song? Here it is, no doubt about it: you listen to it and you feel like you have him next to you, while wasting your time you don't even have tears to console you. Boz sweeps through his writing gathering the clouds of the 50s to amalgamate them with the weary winds of this decade. Morrissey writes, describes and lifts our gaze to fill it with glued truths that take our breath away.

Why Don't You Find out for Yourself

Here you get the feeling that being nailed to a cross can be wonderful: Whyte and Moz create a melodic cell, a feather that travels under the chin of truth prone to the weeping of errors. The melody captures, the semi-acoustic guitar and the electric one dance together and Moz has only to write a vocal ballet that will always shine with its infinite theatricality, while our reflections become challenging because this man knows how to understand the truth perfectly.

I Am Hated For Loving

Whyte and Moz in splendid form enter almost gently into a bitter, sour story, with hints of violence wisely kept almost hidden, almost... Like a spider's web that smiles cruelly, so does the atmosphere of the song that seems gentle while instead becoming a well-aimed punch to the heart. The long musical end is made perfect by a simple but harmonious vocalization to cling to.

Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning

The first of the album's two masterpieces arrives: with the amazing melody written by Boorer, we can hear Moz's singing as we have never heard it to feel what sweetness really is, a sensual yet violent lullaby with its own story that the music knows how to make perfect. Depressed, ironic, sensual, it leads to unstoppable, violent weeping, describing the pain of a desire that finds its cage to die.

Used to Be a Sweet Boy

Morrissey and Whyte put their love for the 70s in a pill, composed of sweetness and loneliness, a cloud which is lost in the sky on a warm sunny day. It can only be listened to in a room, with the window closed, enveloped by a melody that sounds like a music box which sows emotional suspensions, it takes your breath away, while the story eventually grants a kiss to sadness.

The Lazy Sunbathers 

An enchanting arpeggio, Whyte is really good at it and proves it by giving Moz the go-ahead with majestic vocals, on words like rays that are lost in the playground of life, without noise, between laziness and surrender competing with each other. 

Speedway

Here it is, the second masterpiece, written again by Boorer, that concludes the album with Morrissey's most beautiful song ever.

The feeling is that of lyrics that know how to bring together the story of The Smiths with Moz's public and private current affairs, in a poignant, tepid song, a sip of tea into which disappointment, reality, bewilderment, certainties descend, in a dramatic emotional whirlwind. The music is a goddess wrapped in guitars sick of rock tension, with its feet on a shoegaze cloud, enveloping lyrics to enhance them, to make them free to gravitate in our minds, which find themselves shocked by beauty, by microbes eating the tissues of our resistance. The words take up residence to become a tattoo, a lightning bolt that shows the power of Morrissey, who does not use shouting to make us grasp his pain, but rather aspires the words into the microphone to take us inside him on a journey where his mode of expression becomes the place of his wonder, filled with hard truths.

Each Thank You is not the end but the beginning of a profound form of contact and with this album, perhaps, the bond with Morrissey becomes eternal...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford 

25 June 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/5lKYNLYykoFAVRAeV5EqPE?si=IRzCypVPS7SZyufY6Bh8RA