The title of Morrissey's third solo studio album is a sly triple-entendre. It can mean "the power you command," or it can be a pun on "your arse an' all," but it's also a joke about an association football club as subcultural identity. That suggests a song that might be a key to the record—a song that's not actually on it, but one that Morrissey had used to end his 1990 videotape Hulmerist and would use as entrance music some years later.
The specter of "You'll Never Walk Alone", the king of all football-fan sing-alongs thanks to its association with Liverpool (and Pink Floyd), hovers over the whole album: the chopped-up football-kop voices in the middle of "We'll Let You Know", the chord progression and sentiment of "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday", and most of all the relatively uncharacteristic first-person plural Morrissey uses and implies throughout Your Arsenal. Viewed in that light, beginning the album with a song called "You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side" seems formally appropriate.
By 1992, that's exactly what Morrissey needed; he had apparently realized that, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, the only thing worse than being in a rock band was not being in a rock band. Your Arsenal, unlike the previous year's Kill Uncle, sounded like the work of a real group—as indeed it was. He'd assembled guitarists Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer, bassist Gary Day, and drummer Spencer Cobrin for the extensive Kill Uncle tour, and kept them around to record. (Boorer is still playing with Morrissey today, and Whyte stayed with him until 2004.) Boorer had previously played with rockabilly revivalists the Polecats, who'd had minor British hits with covers of David Bowie's "John, I'm Only Dancing" and T. Rex's "Jeepster". And Morrissey roped in one of the former song's architects to produce Your Arsenal: Mick Ronson, who'd been Bowie's guitarist and principal creative foil in the early 1970s.
Morrissey has never been shy about paying homage to his favorite records, but Your Arsenal comes off at first like an out-and-out glam rock pastiche—"glam rock" defined, for these purposes, as "Bowie plus T. Rex minus the strings". "Glamorous Glue" stomps like "The Jean Genie", "Certain People I Know" cops its guitar licks from "Ride a White Swan", and "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" winks so hard at "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" that Bowie winked back, covering it a year later on Black Tie White Noise.
The homage that eventually emerges from Your Arsenal, though, is closer to home: it often sounds like Morrissey and Whyte (who co-wrote eight of its 10 songs) doing their best approximation of the Smiths. It's odd to intimate that someone would be imitating his own band, but really: there could have have been endless ways to arrange "Seasick, Yet Still Docked" that didn't sound quite so much like the Smiths' "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", for instance. On Viva Hate and Kill Uncle, Morrissey had been demonstrating what his voice and his oddball sense of tune could do with collaborators who distinctly weren't Johnny Marr; this time, his band does their damnedest to recapture the old vibe.
It was inevitable that someone would be disgruntled with whatever Morrissey decided to do, and his habit of amplifying anything that annoys anyone means he's more Morrisseyesque than ever before here. That was great news for his singing—his tics are his glories—but it often blindsides his lyrics. Morrissey's commitment to ironizing everything including his own irony ends up undercutting any position he might be staking out. Hence "You're the One for Me, Fatty", whose hook's cleverness leaves him flailing for other utterances to follow it up with. Hence also the (more or less) trumped-up furor over "The National Front Disco": Morrissey is clearly declaring "England for the English" in great big quotation marks, especially considering that at the end of the previous track he's announced that "we are the last truly British people you'll ever know"—nationalism pumped up until it disintegrates into meaninglessness—but all the kisses he's blown to creeps and thugs make it harder to swallow.
Morrissey can't resist ironizing his own team spirit, either, which leads straight to the album's best song and his solo career's best joke, "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful". (Egotists are always funnier when they can mock their own egotism.) Its "we" is a delicious bit of rhetoric—it presumes the listener's agreement—and so is the whiplash sequence of perspective shifts at the end: "You see, it should've been me... Everybody says so." And what is it that makes Morrissey's work so different, so appealing? He spells it out: "Loads of songs/ So many songs... Verse/ Chorus/ Middle eight/ Break, fade." Nobody else is doing that!
Naturally, Morrissey has now doubled down on the annoyance factor of his last few reissues by tinkering with the track listing of Your Arsenal a bit—"Tomorrow" has been replaced by its American single mix. In lieu of a tacky badge, this edition comes with a slightly muddy but passable live DVD filmed at California's Shoreline Amphitheatre in October, 1991, four months or so after the concert that became the Live in Dallas video. The only song it's got in common with the album is "We Hate It...", which was then still six months away from its appearance as Your Arsenal's first single. The new band is solid, and they even work up a bit of rockabilly heat here and there, but nobody's threatening Morrissey's position as the captain of the team, so he's not particularly fighting for it.
