Morrissey - Low In High School
After a three year hiatus following the release of World Peace Is None of Your Business, Morrissey is here to offend your eardrums with another series of lazy rhymes and illiterate poetics. Mozza’s latest album is incontrovertible proof that he has become the very kind of unimaginative, bland, soda cracker artist he used to criticise.
There are a few tolerable songs, such as Jacky’s Only Happy and All the Young People, but they are passable largely because they are instrument-led, drowning out his vocals which these days sound like a drunk karaoke impersonation of himself.
A special shout out must go to Spent the Day in Bed which is a horrific middle-aged cry for revolution, a revolution supposedly achieved through apathy and masturbation. Arguably less of a rebellion and more just a sad old man jerking himself off.
Where once Morrissey appealed to an entire generation with his cultivated image of misunderstood and overlooked outsider, in 2017 it is decidedly harder to listen to him whine about his underappreciated existence when he is worth $50 million.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t little glimmers of good music here, with I Wish You Lonely and Israel fleetingly coming close to a 1988 Viva Hate B-side, but you can’t help but think that even if someone took the best part of every track on Low in High School, it would still barely add up to one good Smiths song.
Back when his voice hadn’t cracked and he had Johnny Marr in tow, Mozza used to be an inspirational idol and master lyricist inspired by Keats and Yeats. But nowadays he writes less like a Romantic poet and more like Dr Seuss.
3/10
