Kill Uncle Yea-Sayers: Langer and Winstanley produced Kill Uncle and it's
the most commercial sounding recording Morrissey has ever made, though it
contains some of his finest, most intimate songs ("There's A Place In Hell
For Me and My Friends").
"... both very good and like nothing else in pop"
"Tunes a loving mother would have trouble humming"
Our Frank
Asian RutSing
Your LifeMute WitnessKing LeerFound Found FoundDriving Your Girlfriend
HomeThe Harsh Truth Of The
Camera Eye(I'm)The End Of The Family
LineThere's A Place In Hell
For Me And My FriendsTony The Pony
Released In March 1991
- Dan O'Kane, CD Review, April 1994
BETTER RELATE THAN NEVER
Welcome back, Mozzer. Three years in an absurd wilderness of his own making
have done sod all for Morrissey's reputation as someone to be taken seriously
and a lot for his image as Mr. Flaming Pillock.
On the few occasions he gave interviews, Morrissey chose to present himself
as arrogant, self-obsessed and depressed. Not much new there, except he wasn't
funny anymore. In the meantime, he released singles from which invention,
melody and the old Moz trick of having something interesting to say had nipped
out to the corner shop with no intention of returning. 'November Spawned A
Monster', 'Interesting Drug', 'Ouija Board, Ouija Board', 'Picadilly Palare'
- a quartet of duller records has not been released in such numbing succession
since the last days of Johnny Hates Jazz.
If ever there was a man who had lost his way, his interest in making music,
or possibly his will to live, it was Morrissey. But by immense good fortune
for the known universe, Moz suddenly decided to write with Mark Nevin, the
one with the hat in Fairground Attraction. This meant that there was a chance
that Morrissey might actually make a good record; and if he didn't, it would
effectively be goodbye to old grumbleguts forever.
So Moz and Nevin went off and worked together. And the result of their unlikely
labour is 'Kill Uncle', the first longish new Morrissey product since 1987.
Produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley and played on by Nevin, Andrew
Paresi and ex-Madness man Bedders, 'Kill Uncle' is a somewhat underweight
33 minutes of music. It's got one rather long song and a couple of very short
ones. And it's pretty good. Nevin and occasional writer Langer have cured
us of Morrissey/Rourke Disease and written flaming melodies for Mr. Music.
They have put nagging hooks and memorable arrangements in places where once
the band merely plodded on to the next verse. And in this context Morrissey
does what we expect of him, some things we don't expect of him and pop music
raises its standard triumphantly over the corpse of 'Ouija Board, Ouija Board'.
The predictable stuff is the least good. There's '(I'm) The Last Of The Family
Line' [sic] - once you've heard the title, you've heard the song - with irritating
Moz lines like "I arrive/With incredible style" which wouldn't be
funny even if you were drunk. There's a self-pitying song about being fancied
by someone who isn't a schemer ('Found Found Found') but it stomps like the
very devil and it has bass guitar the size of Scotland on it. And we have
the rather splendidly final (in both senses of the word) track 'There's A
Place In Hell For Me And My Friends' with its sarcasm and anger-dripping lyric
("All that we hope is that when we go" croons Morrissey, "Our
skin and our blood and our bones don't get in your way/Making you ill the
way they did when we lived") and churchy piano.
Everything else leaves the production line with a bang. 'Our Frank' you may
well have heard, with its mess of riffing guitars like a sudden shower of
spears and incredibly unpleasant lyric about vomiting on pullovers. It is
a cousin of thunder and a sister to the remarkable 'Mute Witness', wherein
the guitars wail and crash like the Pixies on amyl nitrate, the piano clatters
like some old Sparks tracks, a keyboard goes "oh ah oh ah" and Morrissey
sings a Twin Peaks-like vignette of a woman standing on a table and
pointing to a frisbee.
With the possible exception of the five minute chord-grinding and fairly self-explanatory
'The Harsh Truth Of The Camer Eye', Morrissey allows compassion to rear its
be-quiffed head too. 'Driving Your Girlfriend Home' is a short story of pain
and 'Asian Rut' is classically bonkers. Only Morrissey could have decided
to answer critics by writing a song where an Asian teenager attempts to revenge
his best friend's death and is murdered by English boys, the whole shebang
set to a funeral march with grim violin stylings top it. The pudding is nearly
over-egged, but not quite.
So 'Kill Uncle' is a collection of songs that are both very good and like
nothing much else in pop. They range every which way across styles and themes
and still they sound like only Morrissey could have sung them. 'Kill Uncle'
bodes immensely well for the future, not least because this is the first Moz
album where half the songs are about someone other than himself. It also indicates
to all but the dimmest that a Smiths reunion is about as useful and relevant
to anyone's life as a Yell! reunion.
For now, things are great Moz-wise and all we need is a world tour, a few
happy smiles and another top album which has actually got 45 minutes of music
on it and we will all be in paradise together.
- David Quantick, New Musical Express, 1991
Nay-Sayers:
An
under-nourished 33 minutes 5 seconds of lyrically potent (possibly for the
first time in pop music history the words "Chihuahua" and "Tizer"
are used and successfully rhymed) but musically drab doodlings. Pop meisters
Langer and Winstanley produced but Our Frank and Mute Witness aside, these
are tunes a loving mother would have trouble humming. (**)
- Q, September 1992
After falling out with Stephen Street, Morrissey enlisted Fairground
Attraction guitarist Mark Nevin plus celebrated Madness producers Clive Langer
and Alan Winstanley for his second official album. It's a slender volume at
just 33 minutes, featuring lovely featherlight ballads ("Driving Your Girlfriend
Home", "I'm The End Of The Family Line") but also flashes of the worryingly
lazy self-parody which would dog future releases. (***)
- Stephen Dalton, Uncut, 1998
TIMID
Struggling for compassion and inspiration, Morrissey's creative rafters may
be riddled with woodworm.
No stranger to the extravagant gesture, on the sleeve of his
first all-new long-player since 1988's Viva Hate, Morrissey is pictured from
below as if he were a soapbox orator belabouring a gathering of the curious
under a clouded English sky. Which, perhaps, he is. Less exquisitely titled
than its predecessor, Kill Uncle still offers no balm to that dwindling band
who hold that singers by their mere popularity should be obliged to serve
the young an example of moral rectitude and good table manners. Sadly, it
also offers Morrissey's worried fans further evidence of woodworm in the creative
rafters, a state of affairs one could have predicted by noting that this much
agonised-over follow-up to Viva Hate totals just 33 minutes and five seconds
of playing time - less, once suspects, a return to LPs like they used to make
'em (and a snook cocked at value-for-money CD owners), than an admission that
the muse has been visiting fitfully of late.
So much for the width; the quality of a Morrissey record usually takes patience
to perceive in all its greyish glory, but 15 plays yield exactly one classic
song, a slice of potted "controversy", a few mildly good jokes, some meticulous
invisible mending by the musical boys (including producers Clive Langer and
Alan Winstanley, drummer Andrew Paresi, ex-Fairground Attraction songwriter/guitarist
Mark E. Nevin and ex-Madness keyboardist Mark "Bedders" Bedford) - and no
fewer than two fond farewells, to be found of course, at the end of the album.
From the top, Our Frank pictures Morrissey in un-Morrissey mood, bored rigid
by a friend's "open, deep conversation", dying for a drink and a ciggie and
contemplating secretly throwing up all over his tedious friend's jumper which
has, in its "vulgarity", hijacked his interest. Morrissey's detractors will
be amused. Asian Rut reprises 1988's Bengali In Platforms and, to a marching
beat spiced with the sort of music often associated with flock wallpaper,
it pictures a "tooled-up Asian boy" in a light both sympathetic and alarmed,
as if Morrissey would like to be able to identify more closely with the mild-mannered
victim-turned-avenger but can't close the cultural gap.
This air of being an observer not participant extends to Driving Your Girlfriend
Home, where he finds mixed feelings as a reluctant confidant; King Leer, a
Woody Allen-esque vignette of unrequited attaction enlivened by the appearance
of a "homeless chihuahua" for which Morrissey must find not only a home but
a rhyme. It is immediately followed by an almost identical tune with a different
set of lyrics, The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye, where the opening couplet
of "Churchilian legs, hair barely there" is as good as it gets.
Mute Witness is the best song by a long way, an observation - again from a
timid distance - of a traumatised, perhaps raped woman trying to "describe
the fright of last night/4am Northside, Clapham Common" (The Smiths' Suffer
Little Children seven years ago likewise explored English kitchen-sink crime).
In the tension between the cold, clever craft of his telling (the music is
almost Sparks-like cerebral rock), and the compassion he is struggling to
feel, Mute Witness gets under the skin and stays there. Found Found Found
and Sing Your Life are recycled Morrissey-by-the-yard, while (I'm) The End
Of The Family Line should have been the tongue-in-cheek valediction, but he
follows it with a bare piano carrying the even barer bones of what could almost
be a Broadway show tune, There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends, wherein
our hero revisits the well-trodden turf of his own image as perennial outsider
making jest of his tragic existence.
Like much here, it's a thin song but an excellent title. When all else fails,
Morrissey still gives good headline.
- Mat Snow, Q
Moz-Speak:
"I do openly admit that some of the songs, some of the solo
songs have been substandard. And when it occurred to me, around the period
of the Kill Uncle album, it was a great shock to me to actually make a few
records which I didn't really think were exceptional for me. But I think I'm
through that time now. It was actually a very bad time for me privately, also."
- Morrissey, Raygun, March 1994
"It's not necessarily sexual. I don't think I mention sexuality
in the song at all. But even in the limited capacity of finding a real friend
and realising that it actually does take a lifetime to find one, I'm always
slightly exalted by coming across someone with whom one has an instant rapport,
an instant harmony..."
- Morrissey on "Found Found Found", Select, July 1991
