"I am a living sign," Morrissey sings on "Vicar in a Tutu", from the Smiths' 1986 apex, The Queen Is Dead. If the words evoke Morrissey's dual personae as myth and mythmaker, their religious overtones are a subtle reminder that he's also a never-quite-recovering Catholic. Though his 1990s relocation to Los Angeles, the sunny center of 20th century glamour, elicited little surprise, his recent move to Rome seems even more natural: There, the Pope of Mope can reel around the fountain of both Occidental culture and inexpiable guilt.
From humdrum towns to giddy London, from Sunset Boulevard to the Eternal City, this living sign signifies, first and foremost, himself. Ringleader of the Tormentors is a new Morrissey album, not a new Morrissey; attempts to wring autobiographical revelations from its lyrics are easy, but ultimately futile. Accusations of self-parody, after losing their sting sometime around "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", remain apt but, in Morrissey's case, often irrelevant. On his eighth solo album, the enigmatic warbler again sounds contradictory notes on love, death, the divine, and the despised. All that's really changed are his collaborators-- Ennio Morricone, T. Rex/Bowie producer Tony Visconti, guitarist/co-songwriter Jesse Tobias-- who trade the televised-car-chase production of 2004 comeback You Are The Quarry for a sound more akin to the glam-rock crunch of Your Arsenal.
Rapturous self-torment-- particularly the chasm between love's possibility and its unrealized fulfillment-- was always the defining condition of the Morrissey experience. For Morrissey's narrators, love and death are two levels of the same double-decker bus-- a theme made explicit on lead single "You Have Killed Me", a strapping rocker reminiscent of "Irish Blood, English Heart". With Hammond organ syncope and Morricone strings, trembling ballad "Dear God, Please Help Me" likens lust to "explosive kegs between my legs," while decorous torch song "I'll Never Be Anyone's Hero Now" places "my one true love...under the ground." As Moz idol Oscar Wilde put it, "Each man kills the thing he loves." Moz's interests were eloquently foreshadowed by another Catholic artist, Jean Genet, whose 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers laces its gay protagonist's exaltation of a beautiful male murderer with references to the Church. Likewise, Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ isn't just about homoerotic S&M.
The famous mind/body dichotomy from "Still Ill" tellingly neglects the soul, but Morrissey still can't escape what he's called "inbuilt guilt." Even "Dear God, Please Help Me", Moz's most emotionally beguiling song in years, grows ambivalent at the moment inattentive critics have cited as the singer's coming-out: When Morrissey sings, "Dear God, did this kind of thing happen to you?/ Now I'm spreading your legs/ With mine in between/ Dear God, if I could I would help you," is he addressing a lover, or a loving deity? On "You Have Killed Me", which contains some of this infamous celibate's most candidly sexual lines since Meat Is Murder-era B-side "Stretch Out and Wait" (or at least YATQ's "Come Back to Camden"), the man who ostentatiously forgave Jesus two years ago "for all the desire He placed in me" slyly concludes, "There is no point saying this again/ But I forgive you."
Even when contemplating mortality, Morrissey remains enamored of youth. A children's choir guests on multiple tracks, including fast-paced single candidate "The Youngest Was the Most Loved". Their immature voices bestow hair-raising pathos upon a refrain almost too self-evidently jejune for the middle-aged Moz to sing alone: "There is no such thing in life as normal." The choir returns for "The Father Who Must Be Killed", an equally energetic knife-attack on a stern stepfather, which ends in eerie laughter. Elsewhere, Morrissey marks the passing of time more keenly, with even more overt auto-plagiarisms. "It's the same old S.O.S.," he concedes amid the Roman rain, midtempo groove, and orchestral crescendos of the epic "Life Is a Pigsty". "Even now in the final hour of my life/ I'm falling in love again," he adds, subtly acknowledging that love is not as new to his music as recent press has implied.
Morrissey's poignancy, in his best solo work as in his vivid Smiths prime-- what critic Simon Reynolds once called "a piercing beauty, or a sweet ache"-- often inflames the exhilarating terror of loneliness just as it elevates the sensations of love through comparison with Moz's unrequitable romantic perfections. The complicated gender roles, the ubiquitous allusions, the games of irony, art, and style serve equally to ignite a listener's curiosity. Ringleader of the Tormentors is, rather than the now-anticipated letdown, another fitting heir to that legacy. The living sign again: "This one is different, because it's us."
