Even ordinary life is pretty complex stuff, or so says American Splendor. Morrissey, pop’s foremost oddball-in-exile, has put a lot of living into this, his rebirth after seven years, and such a stretch in such an extraordinary life should provide rich, plentiful pickings. It does, in part. But autobiographical as it is, you listen to this record a few times and what you take with you is a strange, sad emptiness.
The odd thing is: listen to the record backwards and you might feel completely different. ‘America Is Not The World’ opens with a lyric that leaves you laughing and gasping. Lobbing a quick molotov at the White House, where “steely blue eyes with no love in them scan the world”, Morrissey catalogues the failings of his adopted home, and like a lover’s tiff it’s fierce but ends tenderly. Were the track listing reversed, You Are The Quarry would end with the only “I love you” of the album.
Back home, a betrayed nation’s pent-up anger at Blair finds voice in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ as he puts a torch to the institutions out to ruin Britain, and to one that ruined us too: “I’ve been dreaming of a time when / The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories / And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell”. It’s fucking ferocious, it’s over before it begins and it’s one of the great political pop songs: this is how you use the rapt attention a comeback brings.
Still, even inside this early victory lurks the couplet “There is no one on earth I’m afraid of / And I will die with both of my hands untied”. It’s a mild, early manifestation of some closely related themes that repeat throughout the album: paranoia, oppressive self-aggrandisation and dull score-settling. You can hear it in ‘I’m Not Sorry’, in the daft melodrama of ‘How Could Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel’, and it even tarnishes ‘I Like You’, otherwise a sweet, cool, throwaway thing.
Worst of all, the final song, ‘You Know I Couldn’t Last’, a diatribe against the mechanics of the music industry, lures you in with huge, heart-lifting Bowie chords, and swiftly sinks you with cripplingly bitter words about things no-one but Morrissey could conceivably care about. He chooses to take a bow with a song that reminds this writer of ‘Mr Writer’: this is what I meant by sad and empty.
So why aim all the lyrical live ammunition at Bush, Blair and still-borne grudges? Why is America — an abstraction — the only love worth a mention? ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ helps us out here. Taking the form of a pained prayer, the song bespeaks a desperate, chronic loneliness and, worse an inability to do anything about it. “Why did you give me so much desire / When there is nowhere I can go to offload this desire? / And why did you give me so much love in a loveless world / When there is no one I can turn to, to unlock all this love? Do you hate me?”
A difficult, powerful song, like ‘I Know It’s Over’ you would not wish to have to sing it about yourself, and would not be brave enough to do so anyway. Seven years ago, an increasingly agitated audience looked askance at Maladjusted and waved goodbye: come back when you have something to say. This is what we meant.