Morrissey: Makes Up a Lie

 

Stop me if you think that you have heard this one before. Make Up Is a Lie feels like too many records from Morrissey’s late period. A couple of good songs. Just a couple. And then way too much filler.

It is a strange situation. Morrissey has ended up in that uncomfortable category of artists who were once huge and who today cause discomfort or outright rejection. The same territory where figures like Varg Vikernes or Kanye West have also landed. People who at one point seemed like cultural giants and who now live surrounded by controversy, contradictions or plain exhaustion. Nobody chooses to fall there. But some do anyway.

I want to believe that Morrissey was as cool as he seemed when he was young. Or at least as convincing as when he released albums like You Are the Quarry or Years of Refusal. In those years there was still a curious connection with certain energy from Californian pop punk. There was speed. There was spark. There was sarcasm. There was something alive inside.

Today he sounds confused. At times angry. Or perhaps more accurately bitter and out of place, as if he were still desperately searching for the exact spot to place his voice in the present.

If today I wanted to listen to a great singer songwriter I would choose Bob Dylan without thinking twice. If I wanted something darker I would play Leonard Cohen. If I wanted something brutal I would go to Nick Cave. If I wanted something more strident I would go straight to Glenn Danzig. Well, my favorite, as you know, is Lou Reed.

But I no longer know where to place Morrissey.

Sometimes an impossible scenario comes to my mind. I would have loved to hear Glenn Danzig singing This Charming Man or Something Is Squeezing My Skull. It would be a fascinating experiment. It is not going to happen, of course, but the idea reveals something important. Those songs have a strength that I miss today in Morrissey himself. A strength that no longer appears anywhere.

After listening to most of Make Up Is a Lie another image comes to me. A Morrissey album produced by Giorgio Moroder in the nineties. Moroder producing The Last of the Famous International Playboys would have been phenomenal. The mixture of British melodrama and electronic pulse would have been explosive in a way that still has not been attempted.

I also imagine another possibility that never happened. Daft Punk appearing on some tracks of this album. It would have made sense. Several songs seem to beg for that electronic push that here is only hinted at and ends up falling short, never taking off, never daring.

Songs like The Night Pop Dropped or Lester Bangs would have breathed better with that kind of production. Even Notre Dame, which has a synth pop vocation, would have gained a completely different dimension with the precise touch of the French duo.

The same happens with the Roxy Music cover. Morrissey performs Amazona and the result is not terrible but it is not memorable either. It is one of those moments where you feel the idea was good and it stayed exactly halfway.

I will not deny it. Morrissey still does something that nobody else knows how to do. His voice remains unique. That timbre that mixes melancholy, irony and melodrama is still intact, still his. Nobody else has it.

The problem is different. Morrissey promised too much with that lost album called Bonfire of Teenagers. The expectation was so great and so prolonged that now any record that appears and is not that one ends up seeming minor by comparison.

Someone once told me that Morrissey sang as if he were very bored. For years I thought that was an unfair yet fascinating reading. But after listening to Make Up Is a Lie I am starting to understand exactly what they meant.

Here Morrissey sounds, unfortunately, bored.

The album has some interesting ideas. There are moments where it seems something is about to take off. But it does not. Morrissey does not bring the energy or the spark necessary for those ideas to truly breathe.

And that is the real tragedy. Perhaps we will have to wait another six years to see if he finally records something that measures up to the best of his catalog.

Make Up Is a Lie does not.