The charming Smiths

Press, 2 May 1985, Page 18

The charming Smiths

THE SMITHS “Meat Is Murder” (Rough Trade 81). The cover of the new Smiths LP, “Meat Is Murder,” is a departure from their previous 60’s film and TV fixation — instead of Elsie Tanner, we get a grim young soldier with the legend “Meat Is Murder” scrawled on his helmet. The music has also toughened up a little, but at the core of The Smiths, Stephen Morrissey is still the sensitive spokesman for the post-Culture Club generation.

He cannot resist having a good whine, and his voice

lapses into a particularly irritating campy falsetto at times, but, as usual, the songs are good enough to outweigh this minor quibble. This LP is harder to get used to than the first — in contrast to the sharp focus of “Reel Around The Fountain,” from the debut, is the busy, at times frenzied, sound on “Meat Is Murder.”

The metallic twang of the guitarist, Johnny Marr, is still there, but this time round, the band has the confidence in the studio to bring out the real bite of, say, “How Soon Is Now,” or the title track.

Morrissey draws on his less-than-perfect childhood at length on “Meat Is Murder.” “The Headmaster Ritual” is a bitter tale of his schooldays, set to some classic Marr guitar: “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools/spinless swines, cemented minds.”

His homosexual stirrings are retold on “I Want The One I Can’t Have,” but a line such as “he killed a policeman when he was thirteen/and somehow that really impressed me” seems thoughtless and hard to understand from a supposedly gentle lad.

“Barbarism Begins At Home” is another key track, this time about the touchy subject of child abuse, and again it is tackled with a genuine empathy with the subject that another bands might not achieve. At this point, you might be thinking that the album sounds like an aural “Les Miserables,” and it certainly does lack the instant pop thrill of “Heaven Knows I’m

Miserable(!) Now,” or “This Charming Man,” but the first three songs on side two easily make up for that. First up is the single (included on N.Z. pressings only, import fans) “How Soon Is Now,” a big departure from the usual melodic pop into a tremolo-laden epic sound, which has certainly gained a few new Smiths fans since Radio U began playing it. “Nowhere Fast” goes exactly there, but I thoroughly recommend the trip, and then the sort of aching, swooning melody that Morrissey is so good at emerges on “Well I Wonder.”

Overall, “Meat Is Murder” is a classy step forward for a band that many people were writing off as wimpy popsters, and songs like “How Soon Is Now” prove The Smiths have the muscle to go even further. -TONY GREEN.