It's Time the Tale Were Told!!

What a classic album - this is a great debut - and in my eyes it is every bit as good as 'the Queen is Dead'. 'What Difference Does It Make' is one of the best songs Morrissey ever penned - it is really one of his songs that sums up all of his work as an artist. No other band of the 80's was so intelligent!

Solid if disappointing debut album

This debut album from The Smiths, while excellent, is nowhere near the quality of their later albums. This has nothing to do with the songwriting and everything to do with the production. The album had already been recorded once using producer Troy Tate (and if you can find a copy of the bootleg Troy Tate Album, you'll be surprised at how much better it is than this). The arrangements and production on this album were altered to the point of sanitizing the music a bit too much. That being said, the songs are top-notch, especially Pretty Girls Make Graves, Suffer Little Children, Still Ill, What Difference Does it Make, Hand in Glove, etc. While I wouldn't recommend this as your first Smiths CD to buy, it's definitely a great album and essential to your Smiths collection.

Still Ill

Morrissey's perversity can cut the listener if one is caught in the vice he grips his subjects with. As other reviewers have pointed out, this album shares much with the likes of Joy Division and the punk ethos of the early 80's, with cult-leader Morrissey's love of Romantics like Oscar Wilde meshed in to add a bit of dandiness and decorum to his rebellious yells.



If one can understand the perversity of this band's work from the better point of view (from the opposite of those whom he criticizes), then it will occur to the listener that this is a work of uncanny and unparallelled accomplishment, perhaps more raw and stark than most punk records in its sober and too-frank yet bold treatment of contemporary issues such as industrialization, sexualization, pretty girls, and murders of children. All this done with sufficient reverance or irreverence deserved by such subjects. And such humour also! One would entirely miss what the Smiths are delivering if they don't catch the perverse humour involved.



Upon being seized by the direct tone and lyrics of a song such as "Still Ill," whether or not living in England, how can one not declare this a great album? Many people have tried to rank into some sort of list the albums of the Smiths, placing this one somewhere behind "The Queen is Dead," and even behind "compilations".. (gasp).... (pause)



...Such folly..! You can't compare the head of a snake with its belly. This is the head of the enormous serpent that spawned these artists into musical recognition, and what a wonderful face this snake had. "The Queen is Dead" is the diamond shape on the belly of the snake, but this was the diamond shape on the head which we saw as it was emerging from its Manchester abyss. No need to put one album beneath another one. Why do that anyway? Who are they trying to persuade to buy what? I'm almost confident that ones who do would deserve the scorn of Morrissey himself and others too.



If one doesn't like a song on the album doesn't mean it's not good. One must appreciate things one might even be disturbed by, and criticize by other things than sheer pleasurableness. By such other criteria, this work *is* a masterpiece. It speaks about an era, goes beyond individuality of its composers, and even still speaks to us today. One may be troubled by this album's lack of technical lustre or popular sensibility. One would also be a fool however if one didn't recognize in this album the rebirth of the poet-musician as the gadfly of one's times.