Make-Up Is a Lie <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Artist: Morrissey<\/p>\n
Label: Sire<\/p>\n
When Morrissey<\/a> played Dublin in the summer of 2023 he brought with him a chip on his shoulder even more prominent than his famous quiff. <\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t release music any more because I\u2019m an individual, and that isn\u2019t allowed,\u201d he told a Vicar Street crowd<\/a> that swooned like teenagers at a boy-band concert. \u201cEverybody must be the same. Sing the same songs, do the same things, like the same people.\u201d<\/p>\n He finally has released new music \u2013 though not the album that he long claimed was censored by a music industry terrified of individuality. That record was Bonfire of Teenagers, a project no label would seemingly touch because of a title track that criticised the response to the bombing of an Ariana Grande<\/a> concert at Manchester Arena in 2017, which killed 22 people, and the bereaved city\u2019s subsequent adoption of the Oasis song Don\u2019t Look Back in Anger as a rallying cry.<\/p>\n \u201cThe morons swing and say Don\u2019t Look Back in Anger,\u201d goes the chorus. \u201cI can assure you I will look back in anger \u2019til the day I die.\u201d<\/p>\n Bonfire of Teenagers continues to smoulder in a vault somewhere \u2013 where it presumably still includes the Miley Cyrus<\/a> backing vocals that she would later request to have removed. <\/p>\n By contrast, no pop stars feature on the thoroughly three-star, achingly okayish album that Morrissey has actually put into the world: the dour, charmless, intermittently tuneful Make-Up Is a Lie.<\/p>\n The big relief for war-weary Moz heads is that little here will add to the rap sheet against a singer who has thoroughly tarnished his status as the greatest lyricist in the history of popular music. <\/p>\n There is no repeat of the cruelty that allegedly saw him compare the victims of the Anders Behring Breivik massacre in Norway in 2011 to \u201cwhat happens in McDonald\u2019s and Kentucky Fried shit every day\u201d, or of the assertion that Nigel Farage<\/a> would \u201cmake a good prime minister\u201d.<\/p>\n The closest bigmouth comes to striking again is Notre-Dame, a mid-tempo, synth-fuelled love letter to the Parisian landmark that, in its live versions, leaned into conspiracy theories around the fire that gutted the cathedral (\u201cbefore investigations they said\/ it\u2019s not terrorism\u201d).<\/p>\n The offending line has been modified on the recorded version; now he merely observes darkly, \u201cBefore investigations they said\/ there\u2019s nothing to see here.\u201d<\/p>\n Otherwise, and slightly incredibly, this is a bog-standard late-period-Moz LP. He is in fine voice; the guitars courtesy of Jesse Tobias and Carmen Vandenberg have the boisterous energy that Morrissey has favoured since parting ways with Johnny Marr<\/a> and The Smiths<\/a>; and the lyrics drip with the vitriol that has replaced the poetic melancholy of his early writing. (The chorus of the shuffling indie-pop excursion Headache intones \u201cI don\u2019t even like you\u201d over and over.)<\/p>\n Morrissey has always been the laureate of the tart put-down. But now there is also space for him to wax wistful about his childhood \u2013 his indie-folk foray Zoom Zoom the Little Boy is a portrait of the artist as an enthusiastic seven-year-old \u2013 and to pay tribute to his favourite gonzo music journalist, the late Lester Bangs<\/a>, on the chugging power ballad of the same name. <\/p>\n You can see why Bangs would appeal to Morrissey, with his love for piling metaphor upon metaphor and finding, in the dead weight of purple prose, a sort of poetry. <\/p>\n Morrissey does likewise here, whether singing against a backdrop of glam guitar (on The Night Pop Dropped, which is rumoured to be about David Bowie<\/a>) or sincerely covering Roxy Music<\/a> (with Amazona, here imbued with a gadabout jangle).<\/p>\n If a long way short of The Smiths, Make-Up Is a Lie is ultimately bad-tempered and argumentative rather than actively offensive. If not sufficient to meaningfully put his career back on track, it will be enough to keep his remaining fans onside. <\/p>\n It could have been a lot worse \u2013 and while Morrissey\u2019s cancellation has been threatened for decades, this album strongly argues that he\u2019s still a long way from the cemetery gates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Make-Up Is a Lie \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 Artist: Morrissey Label: Sire When Morrissey played Dublin in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[12875,46067,88,99388,230483,36575,70523,216,7683,230484,70524],"class_list":{"0":"post-506976","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ariana-grande","9":"tag-david-bowie","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-johnny-marr","12":"tag-lester-bangs","13":"tag-miley-cyrus","14":"tag-morrissey","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-nigel-farage","17":"tag-roxy-music","18":"tag-the-smiths"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}