The Smiths
Strangeways, Here We Come
Rough Trade/Sire, Released 1987
It was all falling apart, and weren’t they keen for you to know. Morrissey and Marr were hardly speaking to one another when they recorded Strangeways, Here We Come – never mind how they felt about the unfairly maligned hired help on bass and drums – and they didn’t even wait for the album’s official release before allowing the word of the band’s split to get out. Contrary to the last, though, both songwriters would later call this fractured, difficult breakup album the band’s masterpiece.
It certainly begins fantastically, Morrissey’s disembodied cries (don’t all Smiths albums begin with the disembodied cries of the Moz?) introducing the hard charge of "A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours," incidentally the last perfect song title in a career full of them. A run of much-loved singles (and what Smiths singles weren’t perfect?) follows: "I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish," "Girlfriend In A Coma," and "Stop Me If You Think that You’ve Heard This One Before." Interrupting this mini-greatest hits is one of the two really special songs here, "Death of a Disco Dancer." Bluesy, sinister, and featuring a manic Morrissey on pounding piano outtro, it’s unlike anything else The Smiths ever did, and if its big ideas are a little incomplete, it’s a final testament to the group’s stubborn iconoclasm.
With one notable exception, the rest of Strangeways’ songs are decidedly less special. But if some of the ideas are shamelessly recycled – more shambling rockabilly, guv? — the album remains compelling in its portrait of a songwriting team breaking up on the rocks. The music and the lyrics are practically at war with one another throughout, Morrissey’s delight in pinning his most vicious ideas to Marr’s lightest fare reaching its pinnacle on "Girlfriend In A Coma" and "Unhappy Birthday." "Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before" is just plain mean: had a group ever publicly skewered its own work like this before? Maybe George Harrison’s "Only A Northern Song." But that song sucked. This one is pure self-loathing genius.
In retrospect it seems obvious that the tensions between the songwriters were always what made The Smiths so interesting, and so it’s not hard to understand why Strangeways’ ultra-tense atmosphere would prove fascinating for years to come. Strangeways, Here We Come stands up to Tusk and Let It Be and Second Coming in the Great Albums by Disintegrating Bands category; none of those, however, had a song as simultaneously sublime and ridiculous as "Paint A Vulgar Picture." Never one for leaving well enough alone, Morrissey couldn’t resist his own little farewell operetta, the tale of The Smiths’ demise (at least as Morrissey saw it) up close and personal. By turns touching ("I begged take me with you / I don’t care where you’re going") and stuffed with absurd self-pity ("To you I was faceless I was boring / A child from those ugly new houses"), the song triumphs thanks to Marr’s spiraling, ascendant arrangement, arguably his most dramatic composition since "Reel Around the Fountain."
And so ended the career of rock ‘n’ roll’s most unique band. We’ll never see their like again, and thank God for that. Some stories should only be told once.
Posted to Inkblot by Jesse Fahnestock