Remember when Morrissey was actually good? What happened? Of course, there’s the Smiths, one of the greatest bands of all time. They’re responsible for some of the best music ever captured in a studio. From their self-titled debut to Strangeways, Here We Come, and all the compilations and one-off singles in between, you can’t deny their excellence, even if Moz’s pivot to Islamophobia, far-right ideology, Zionist outspeak, and defending sex pests sours his legacy—it really is tragic to see an artist who once felt like a beacon for outcasts turn into a repellent, but I digress. And even outside of his work with Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce, his solo work once felt vital, too. Take songs like “Suedehead,” “Everyday Is Like Sunday” or “The Last of the Famous International Playboys,” for instance. But these days, it just sounds like the king is dead, boys.
Enter his 14th solo album, Make-Up Is a Lie, produced by longtime collaborator Joe Chiccarelli. It’s rife with boring instrumentals and clunky lyrics that indulge Morrissey at his most frustratingly gauche. When he’s not canceling shows left and right, feuding with his label, or demanding his autobiography be a certified Penguin Classic, he’s penning some of the most painfully average (at best) and strikingly awful (at worst) songs of his (threateningly) burgeoning oeuvre. It has become all the more clear that when he doesn’t have a strong collaborator in, say, Johnny Marr or Boz Boorer, Morrissey succumbs to his worst impulses.
Let’s start with the title track, for example. In the chorus, he repeats the refrain ad nauseam, trying on various rhythms and melodies like he’s grasping at something to say and do to fill up the time. It’s like watching a nervous stand-up comic who’s unsure what to do with their hands. Of course, Morrissey is not entirely at fault here. The song was co-written by his keyboardist Camila Grey, who shoulders at least some of the blame. Boorer, who’s widely credited for crafting Moz’s post-Smiths sound, is no longer here to rein him in. Alain Whyte, another key architect of that style, is still here, but he’s clearly underused, appearing on only five tracks, and only co-writing three.
It somehow gets even worse from there. Moz has the gall to cover “Amazona” by Roxy Music, one of his favorite bands, but strip the original of nearly all its panache. It’s the best song on the album though, mainly because it’s still Roxy Music, but Moz’s graceless butchering is difficult to overlook. The following track, “Headache,” delivers on its title with a sluggish pace and four minutes of drab tedium. Whyte’s melodic guitars resurface throughout, trying to revive this corpse of a song to no avail. Despite his best efforts, it chugs along in complacency.
“Boulevard” sees Morrissey adopt a nursery-rhyme scheme and schoolyard melody that plays out like Fisher-Price Baby’s First Lyrics. “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy” starts out as one of the best songs on the album, thanks to Jesse Tobias’ electric sitars providing something lively and memorable to finally grab onto, but then Morrissey opens his mouth and checks off a list of animals (“he wants to save the cats and the dogs / and the bats and the frogs / and the badgers and the hedgehogs / he wants to save the cows and the sheep / and the squiggles of the deep / and the fox with the butterflies eyes”) in such a melodramatic tone that the end result is unintentionally hilarious. He unleashes a growl (twice!) at the end that makes me wish I was listening to Samuel T. Herring sing instead.
Here, we arrive at the album’s most offensive stretch of songs—not in the anti-woke, xenophobic sense that Moz loves so much, thankfully, but as strong contenders for some of the worst music in recent memory. “The Night Pop Dropped” is an unconvincing Stevie Wonder pastiche, and some chimes even pop up toward the end, as if Morrissey and co. were desperately searching for something, anything, that could redeem it. “Kerching Kerching” takes the nursery-rhyme scheme we heard earlier and somehow degrades it further with some of the laziest lyrics put to paper: “she tells you you’re not good enough, not rich enough / not man enough, not fast enough / not you enough, you don’t joke enough / because you just do not take coke enough.” Then there’s the antepenultimate “Lester Bangs,” who deserves so much more than this. Is it satire? Is it an earnest tribute? Whatever the case, Morrissey pays homage to Bangs’ pen by desecrating his name with a Great Value “Get Lucky” facsimile, dolled up in abysmal lines like “this nerd hangs on your word / I lean, and you are leaned upon.”
At this point, I’d bargain that no one expects anything genuinely great to come out of a new Morrissey record. But there’s something to be said about how Make-Up Is a Lie gives us such monstrous lows. This record might be the nadir of his discography, give or take a few atrocious songs that have littered LPs like I Am Not a Dog On a Chain and California Son. It’s hard to believe that this is the man who once co-wrote songs like “This Charming Man” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” but, nevertheless, here we are. Morrissey really has outdone himself with this one, shattering all preconceived notions of his modern mediocrity. We expected something anodyne and forgettable, but what we received was far worse: an actively terrible album. Do not listen to it.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
