Last update: 31 October 2006
With one possible exception, all the bands below have been deified by sections of their fanbase and by influential sections of the music press to the point where criticism, however justified, is likely to be equated with heresy. The aim of the reviews on this page is to explain why, removed from its social context, their work isn't as good as it's supposed to be. For fun, I've decided to give each album a star rating, which is shown in square brackets; a plus sign is equal to half a star.
The overriding problem with the music of The Smiths is that, for all Morrissey's way with a mordantly witty lyric and Johnny Marr's talent as a commendably unostentatious musician, their songs hardly ever seem to develop beyond their, admittedly sometimes impressive, initial ideas. In other hands this wouldn't matter so much (just ask, say, Stereolab); but The Smiths are further hamstrung by Morrissey's inexpressive singing voice, which resembles a whine dropped by two octaves and never seems to be properly in tune; by his unfortunate penchant for self-obsession and self-pity, which his voice only makes worse; and by the grey Mancunian drizzle which permeates much of the music. The result is that almost all of the songs end up somewhere between mediocre and boring.
Very little about the band's self-titled debut album [*+] is likely to snare the casual listener. The most palatable songs are the likes of "Hand in Glove" and "This Charming Man" (the latter a single added to later editions of the album), although neither is much more than lukewarm jangle-pop; while at the other end of the scale is "Miserable Lie", where Morrissey's falsetto yelps over the band's aimless thrashing add up to something really quite horrible. "Reel Around the Fountain" and "Suffer Little Children", the long songs which open and close the album, fail to turn their controversial subject matter into anything other than protracted exercises in tedium; in particular, Morrissey's droning about Myra Hindley gets boring before the latter song is even half-finished.
Meat is Murder [**] shows a willingness to experiment with different musical styles, but the results impress only patchily, as when Morrissey talks about dropping his trousers to the Queen on "Nowhere Fast". Otherwise, "How Soon Is Now", another single added after the fact, tries to be epic but ends up tedious and repetitive, and "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and "Well I Wonder" start out as pleasant semi-acoustic ballads but are characteristically spoiled by Morrissey's voice and yet more uninspired repetition. "Barbarism Begins at Home" wakes up near the end of its seven minutes to offer up some much-needed changes in texture; however, after three verses of identical lyrics, it's rather too late. The band's nadir comes at the end of the album with the risible title track, a pitiful rant against eating meat whose overdubbed animal noises and self-righteous lyric plummet scarcely-believable depths of bathos.
The Queen Is Dead [**+] regularly makes the higher reaches of lists of The Greatest Albums Of All Time, but while it's undoutbedly The Smiths' best work, it falls far short of the masterpiece it's supposed to be. "Cemetry [sic] Gates" and, in patches, "The Boy with the Thorn in his Side" actually manage to evoke something of substance, but some things haven't changed: the title track once again starts out impressively but runs on to at least twice its natural length; Morrissey's one-take vocal performance on "I Know It's Over" palpably fails to achieve the poignancy it strains for; "Never Had No-One Ever" is a single idea stretched thinly over three and a half minutes; and the lyric to "Some Girls are Bigger than Others" is irritating nonsense. A genuine surprise, however, is "There is a Light which Never Goes Out", whose music of undeniable grace and beauty makes it the band's only genuinely memorable song; it's a pity it has to be spoiled by Morrissey's self-pitying deathwishes and by not properly knowing how to finish.
Strangeways, Here We Come [**] is a predictably disappointing swansong which returns to the usual story of songs starting promisingly but losing interest while being suffocated by Morrisey's voice and repetition in lieu of actual ideas. Thus "Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me" and "Death of a Disco Dancer" are as dismally maudlin as their titles suggest, "Paint a Vulgar Picture" is an unhappy combination of a plodding arrangement and an overwrought lyric about the music business, and even the briefer and more uptempo songs like "Girlfriend in a Coma" and "Unhappy Birthday" fail to inspire. "Death at One's Elbow", featuring a discreet harmonica, is probably the best song here, if only by default.
The Stone Roses [***+] is actually quite a good album; like The Queen Is Dead, however, despite what the band's believe it is neither flawless nor a masterpiece. Much of the problem lies with the monochrome production, which drowns pleasant songs like "She Bangs the Drums" and "Sugar Spun Sister" in too much reverb. Another factor - Ian Brown's tired-sounding vocals, always the band's weak spot - is responsible for destroying the imperiousness with which the music of "I Wanna Be Adored" starts the album. On the hauntingly desolate "Made Of Stone", however, these factors actually combine to produce the album's only unqualified success.
Elsewhere, the album's better songs are genuinely memorable, if flawed; "This Is The One", for example, very nearly succeeds in developing into something transcendent, but can't escape its three-chord straitjacket, while "Bye Bye Badman" is memorable more for the natty guitar at the end than for its identification with the rioters in Paris 1968 - for all that these riots have been romanticised in left-wing folklore, they didn't actually achieve anything. "Waterfall" casts a beguiling spell over four and a half minutes, helped by some lovely blending of acoustic and electric guitars, but runs out of ideas at the end and lurches unnecessarily into double time; equally unnecessary is its reprise in reverse, the self-indulgent and rather boring "Don't Stop". The album's grand finale, all eight minutes and twelve seconds of "I Am The Resurrection", ends with an explosive and genuinely impressive instrumental jam; but the actual song - three verses followed by an ecstatic guitar solo sandwiched between two climatic choruses - is oddly structured and seems to have been truncated to make room for it.
American editions of the album finish with the ten-minute version of the appropriately-titled "Fool's Gold": shorn of the requisite chemical stimulation, this extended jam fails to rise above the tedious.
Happy Mondays released four official albums, of which Bummed and Pills'n'Thrills'n'Bellyaches are generally agreed to be the two most worth listening to. Neither, however, amounts to much more than Shaun Ryder's surrealistic nonsense hollered over repetitive songs based on one musical idea each, and the overall effect is variously baffling, boring, or annoying, and frequently all three. Ultimately, like virtually everything which was inspired by Ecstasy, this is music which can only be properly appreciated with the right combination of drugs; more tellingly, it amounts to an object lesson in what drugs can do to your mind. Just say no, kids.
Bummed [*+] is soaked in Ecstasy to the point where "Mad Cyril" and "Performance" flail uselessly in dense reverb, while a trebly scratchy noise throughout "Moving In With" renders the song painful to listen to. "Brain Dead" is only sporadically interesting, and "Boom", "Bring a Friend", and the closing "Do It Better" start out interestingly but, Smiths-like, fail to develop in any meaningful way and predictably become tedious; Ryder even resorts to out-and-out plagiarism on the last song, which pilfers the melody for "Ticket to Ride". Only when the Mondays get into the groove on "Wrote for Luck" does anything of lasting value emerge; shorn of Ryder's hollering and with some editing of its six minutes, this might have been something.
Pills'n'Thrills [**] features better playing and a clearer production, and starts out with the promise of better material; with a proper singer and a bit of rearrangement, "God's Cop", "Donovan", and "Dennis and Lois" could even actually be worthwhile. Arguably the album's best moment is the slide guitar at the start of the final song, "Harmony", whose luscious honey-like texture cries out for decent singing but doesn't get it. Depressingly, however, "Loose Fit", the filthy "Bob's Yer Uncle", and "Step On" (a cover) all waste interesting ideas in over five minutes each of aimless repetition.
Either way, Definitely Maybe [****] kicks serious ass and is one of the few albums reviewed here which is worthy of a recommendation. There's a passion and aggression about the performances which mean that "Rock and Roll Star", "Up in the Sky" and "Bring It On Down" are still exhilarating; "Live Forever" and "Slide Away" are stirring love songs, the first complete with glorious leap into falsetto at the end of the chorus; and "Cigarettes and Alcohol" harnesses the plagiarised riff of "Get It On" to create something genuinely uplifting. It isn't all great; "Shakermaker" plagiarises the New Seekers, but stutters rather than soars; and there's the infamous rhyme of "Supersonic" with "gin and tonic", which rather detracts from the cleverer rhyming in the rest of the song's lyrics and from the song's sententious mood.
Jon Harris points out in The Last Party that the popularity of (What's The Story) Morning Glory [***] has overshadowed its actual artistic merit. He's perfectly correct: while not actually bad, much of this album fares poorly in comparison to its predecessor; in particular the faster moments - "Hello" (a Gary Glitter rewrite), "Roll With It", "Some Might Say", and "Morning Glory" - pale next to, say, "Up in the Sky". "Don't Look Back in Anger", "Hey Now", and "Wonderwall" are the first stirrings of the midtempo idiom identified by Harris as "Noelrock" which would eventually neuter the energy and experimentation of Britpop; in particular, "Wonderwall", mysteriously voted the second best song of all time by the readers of Q magazine, is dirge-like and maudlin where "Live Forever" is exultant. The atypical "Cast No Shadow" and parts of "Champagne Supernova", the closing hymn to the Gallaghers' drug of choice, are the few monents where the album actually manages to impress.
Every scene has its defining drug, and the cocaine which ultimately killed Britpop is responsible for the way Be Here Now [**] turned out. As with Happy Mondays, this album is a textbook example of the effects of narcotics on artistic judgement; frequently covered in trebly guitars, many of its songs meander on well past their natural length, with occasionally horrible results. "Magic Pie" in particular, with gibberish sung whiningly by Noel Gallagher, is particularly risible; "All Around The World" - incidentally Britain's longest chart-topper - tries to emulate "Hey Jude", but is overdone to absurdity and palpably falls far short; and "Stand By Me" and "Don't Go Away" are plain Noelrock. Only the title track and "It's Getting Better (Man)", the latter the one song with anything like the effervescent energy of the debut, can be said to be anything like successes.
Its tracks selected by the sizeable Oasis fan club, The Masterplan [***] is a collection of fourteen B-sides which, amazingly, is actually better than both the two albums before it. "Stay Young", "Talk Tonight", and "Going Nowhere" may have been better left on their respective singles, but "Headshrinker", "Listen Up", "Underneath the Sky", and especially the live version of "I Am The Walrus" remind you why Oasis where once great. Other highlights are the opening "Acquiesce", with its dual lead vocal, the semiacoustic and reflective "Rocking Chair", and the title track.
Suede [**] doesn't lack for ideas, but they're all in the wrong places; for all its high drama and stabs at seedy glamour ("Let's chase the dragon", Anderson intones ill-advisedly on "So Young"), it ends up as a classic of style over substance, of hollow pretentiousness over heart and soul. The persistent straining for something epic doesn't sit well with the overproduction, and the album becomes bombastic, samey, and ultimately boring; particularly egregious examples are "Pantomine Horse", at the start of which Anderson informs us helpfully that "I was born a pantomine horse", and "Breakdown", both stretched to six minutes but lacking any coherent centre. Somewhat less offensive are "Animal Nitrate", "Metal Mickey", and "The Drowners", which are at least shorter and snappier; but none of them is properly satisfying. The best song, "Animal Lover", would be better without the many repeated yelps of its title; but the rising noise at its end is TOO LOUD and ultimately amounts to the song shooting itself in the foot.
Dog Man Star [**+] is better produced, but the songs are still overblown and convinced of their own importance while basically hollow at heart: the orchestra on "Still Life" is as good an indication of this as any. As before, Brett Anderson can't seem to sing anything straight enough to stop smothering its subtleties; his vocal histrionics are entirely appropriate for the bombast of "We Are The Pigs" and "The Hollywood Life", but much less so for the more restrained likes of "The Wild Ones", "The 2 Of Us", and "Black Or Blue", all of them desparate for something resembling sensitivity. There are a couple of reasonably good songs here: "The Power" almost gets it right, but still can't help going overboard towards the end, and with better lyrics "New Generation" would probably be a success. But an atmospheric song like "Daddy's Speeding" really needs a straightforward arrangement than the fussy production it actually gets, and everything bad about the first album returns with a vengeance in the nine and a half minutes of "The Asphalt World".
The qualities which spoil the preceding albums are reined in to an extent on Coming Up [***], albeit not enough to hide the increasingly trite subjects of the lyrics ("We're the litter on the breeze") or the more irritating aspects of Anderson's voice. The familiar bugbears do resurface on "Picnic By The Motorway", "She" and "Starcrazy"; nonetheless, with more straightforward production, "Trash", "Lazy", and "By The Sea" are actually decent songs with memorable soaring choruses, and "The Beautiful Ones" could be too, were it not for the procession of "la-la-la"'s at the end. "The Chemistry Between Us" spoils its well-crafted music with yet more seedy-glamorous lyrics (the "chemistry" of the title is "Class A Class B") and an overlong running time, and the elegaic "Saturday Night" manages to cross the finishing line with something approaching credit.
Sounding very much like a product of its time, Leisure [**] is a collection of diverting but not terribly essential songs in various contemporary styles, mixing shoegazing ("She's So High", "Sing") and left-field indie ("Slow Down", "Wear Me Down") with clodhopping Madchester rhythms (about half the rest). There aren't enough distinctive ideas to make for a satisfying album, and few songs have much lasting appeal; in particular "Bad Boy", "She's So High", and the appropriately-titled "Repetition" go round in circles and fail to sustain interest. "Sing" does shimmer rather pleasantly, though, and "There's No Other Way" is a quite catchy period piece.
Modern Life Is Rubbish [***] inaugarated Blur's "Life" trilogy of songs about contemporary Britain. The music is intelligent and generally well-crafted with plenty of interesting ideas - witness the music-hall-piano-turns-nightmarish interlude at the end of the first side, for example - but in total it is better conceptually than musically. There's not enough variation in tempo across the fourteen songs for them to be sufficiently distinctive, and many end up sounding like filler or demos; "For Tomorrow" and "Villa Rosie", for example, try hard with unusual chord sequences but are too stilted to work properly. Among the more successful songs are "Turn It Up", "Star Shaped", "Coping", and "Sunday Sunday", which are quite good if a bit overwritten in places, and "Resigned" comes close to being an effective song to finish with; like "Oily Water", on the other hand, it eventually disappears up its own backside in aimless repetition, and "Miss America" is a snooze.
Parklife [****], arguably the defining album of Britpop, is where it all comes together; from the imperious disco of "Girls And Boys", which is spoiled only by being two minutes too long, to the positively epic climax of "This Is A Low", it's much more successful and coherent than its predecessor in its determined Englishness. The album is most fondly remembered for the knockabout fun of its title track - a deserved classic of its time - but the more introspective songs such as "Badhead", "End of a Century", and "To The End" are just as good, slightly less so "Clover Over Dover". Other songs of note are "Tracy Jacks", which marries the spirit of "Parklife" to a lyric which manages to be both amusing and poignant, the new-waveish "Trouble In The Message Centre", and Alex James's unsettling throwaway "Far Out".
The Great Escape [**+] is where smarminess and superciliousness take over and the tone becomes unpleasant. For all the intelligence in the songwriting and arrangements, the lyrics sneer condescendingly at easy targets - wife-swappers in "Stereotypes", rich cocaine addicts in "Charmless Man", the National Lottery on "It Could Be You", cross-dressers in "Mr. Robinson's Quango" - in a way which is largely devoid of charm and consequently unlikeable. It only really works on the rare occasions when Albarn puts some feeling into his lyrics, as on "The Universal" and "Yuko and Hiro", and "Country House" is at least funny; but "Fade Away", "Entertain Me", and "Best Days" quickly get boring, "Top Man" is irritating, and Ken Livingstone's narration on "Ernold Same" sounds tired rather than biting.
Blur [***] abandons Britpop for more experimental left-field music, a departure indicated in "Beetlebum", which reflects on the heroin which infiltrated the later Britpop scene. It isn't lacking in inspiration or willingness to be different; the results, however, too often amount to weirdness for its own sake rather than decent songs, as on "Theme from Retro" and "I'm Just A Killer For Your Love". "Country Sad Ballad Man" meanders; "Movin' On", "M.O.R." and "Chinese Bombs" are brisk but undistinguished; and "Look Inside America" strives for poignancy but can't quite get there, its harp-decorated middle section sounding too smartarse to work. More successful are the uncomplicated "You're So Great" and "Strange News From Another Star", distinguished by their use of acoustic guitar; the splenetic "Song 2", which ironically uses the quiet-loud dynamics of the grunge Blur fought so hard to replace; "Death of a Party", another sour reflection on the death of Britpop; and the exurbian atmospherics of the closing "Essex Dogs", with its memorable image of the sky "the colour of orangeade".
Six of the songs on 13 [**+] are over five and a half minutes long, and three of them approach eight; neither this, nor the continuing substitution of experimentation for proper songs, turns out to be a good thing. Of the few songs which do work, "Tender", distinguished by gospel backing voices and and a an unhurried pace, is the best; "Coffee and TV", with Graham Coxon's understated vocals, is unusual and quite fun, if a bit long; and the desolate "No Distance Left To Run" is a gentle reflection on Albarn's breakup with Justine Frischmann. But "Bugman", spattered with too much distorted guitar, turns from unremarkable to unpleasant; "B.L.U.R.E.M.I." is a similarly uninspiring thrash; "Battle" and "Caramel", two of the three longest songs, are just boring, the latter stirring to life only in its final 30 seconds; "Trimm Trabb" meanders; and "Trailer Park" and "Mellow Song" work better as atmospheric doodlings rather than actual songs.