Wednesday, 30 September 2009
The currency of Morrissey's indian summer firmly and utterly spent, “Swords” is a superfluous, largely redundant compendium of the last five years b-sides, topped off with the kind of half-bothered cover photo that screams apathy and laziness.
Spanning five lineups, and sharing only Morrissey himself and longstanding foil Boz Boorer across the 18 songs, the musical styles, and production is erratic and uneven. Also, and importantly, this collection does not stand up as an album in it's own right : it sounds, like it is, a collection of leftovers and bits and pieces, thrown together with no real care, attention, or consideration for the long lost art of sequence and artistry. Were this a collection of brand new Morrissey songs, it would sink to the low levels of the rightly forgotten “Kill Uncle”. The songs themselves are all, individually, quite good, but at best average album tracks. Coupled with a mogadon tracklisting that sees the whole record dip into midpaced, generally forgettable sludge in the middle quartile. Morrissey can do better.
Some of these songs are fabulous - “Don't Make Fun Of Daddy's Voice”, “The Never Played Symphonies”, and “Ganglord” are the equal of anything on their parent records – and some aren't : repetitive, slight, and quick stgatementgs of no artistic merit. The original single b-side version of “Sweetie Pie” was a deliberately obscured mix of a fine song that ended up being regarded by many as the worst Morrissey b-side since 1959. The material is by no means bad, but at best incoherently sequenced, often sunk in mogadon pacing and space-filling tedium with dull songs, and sounds exactly like what it is : a selection of average b-sides from an aging artists, peppered with the occasional gem, and omitting some of the finer non-album songs from his era.
Early purchasers get yet another, short, Morrissey live album, that duplicates many songs from his previous concert releases and miraculously omit many of the songs in his current repetoire in favour of more live version(s) of “Life Is A Pigsty” and “I Just Want To See The Boy Happy”. As an appendix, a selection of 'deleted scenes', it's an OK stocking filler, but as a record in it's own right, “Swords” is amongst the worst of Morrissey's body of work. It's not as incoherent, careless, and cheap as “The World Of Morrissey” though.Only registered users can write comments.
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