Morrissey, "Now My Heart Is Full" (1994)

(listen)

Over the years, The Queen Is Dead has only sounded better, but I must say I never connected well or easily with the Smiths. Yet somehow, many years later, the Morrissey solo album kicked off by this song, Vauxhall and I, went directly to my heart (all that Graham Greene name-checking notwithstanding). Seeing the show approximately in support of it only cemented the affection, not least perhaps because the audience hysteria for him was pitched at such extreme and infectious levels. Later that night I caught sight of fans sprinting in the street after his tour bus, screaming his name. It's an uneven album, but about half is in this vein: sultry and vulnerable ballads with the ability to soar, sticky with emotion. "Hold on to Your Friends" and "The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get" sound nearly as good. As pop stars go, Morrissey remains one of the most interesting, sincere and eccentric like Jonathan Richman, fascinating and hard to parse like Aladdin Sane-era Bowie. I take Morrissey at face value, perhaps because he appeals to all sorts. When he says his heart is full, it's hard to explain, and he won't even try to, there's no need to say any more. It's all validated in the thick churn of the music, a wanton mess of rock band, strings, and droning keyboard figures delicately touching and holding the important notes. It's likely that the elegiac tone is product of losses Morrissey suffered in the early '90s, deaths of people close to him. I'm sorry for his loss, of course, and would not wish anything like it on anyone. But the result was nonetheless music that makes my heart full, and does still.

49. Electronic, "Disappointed" (1992)

(listen)

This being one of those songs that may be found in multiple versions and mixes, it's probably necessary for me to say that I think I prefer the "Electronic Mix" (aka "Original Mix") as opposed to the "Single Mix"—though certainly either is superior to any others I know. But the former uses its extra 1:20 or so to get particularly good and lush. The song itself is virtually restricted to motifs and gestures, nothing concrete about it at all, but the mood does carry a good load of its own particularities, and the thing is just so beautiful when it swells up big. It's another Electronic song all draped in Pet Shop Boys finery, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call it their best running away. Keyboard washes tall as skyscrapers, chukka-chukka guitar that rides it up and down, Bee Gees-like sighing "ahhhs," a focused self-determination as it fully engages, and the bonbon operatics as it cascades into the chorus. "Disappointed, once more / Disillusioned, encore." I'm not, of course, "disappointed" myself, at least not with this lovely confection (of course I have been disappointed in love, why else rank something like this so high?). All that lovely candy-coated Gilbert O'Sullivan crap, great big wads of sweet self-pity and the colossal heaving sigh that accompanies the main declaration. It's basically "Alone Again (Naturally)" updated for a world that now includes a vaster array of sonic textures and machines that make beats. Compare and contrast: "I promise myself to treat myself / And visit a nearby tower / And climbing to the top / Throw myself off" vs. "From the sound of your voice, the promise you make / You're somebody I can believe in / Someone who won't leave me feeling..." Well, you can guess the rest. And that's about it. Except: over all too soon.

Raise the Pressure (1996)

To my surprise I'm prepared to call this second Electronic album the better of the first two. It's a surprise because I was actually quite fond of that first one in its time, and dismissed this in its as something of a disappointment. But somewhere along the line it really got its hooks in. The songs that work most on me here, such as "Out of My League" and "Second Nature" and "Time Can Tell," were not necessarily the attempts to find a hit—generally this follow-up never did nearly as well as the first. I'm certainly fond of the kickoff track, "Forbidden City," which eked into the UK top 20 and sets the terms for much of what's to come: sparkling production, self-conscious mid-'90s electronica flourishes subordinated to soft mood and charged atmosphere, and the soaring finery of gifted songwriters who just happen to be clicking better than anyone, even themselves, probably could have suspected. No Neil Tennant this time, just Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner and their merry band of keyboardists (one of the latter, Karl Bartos, gets co-writing credit with Marr and Sumner on nearly half of the 13 tracks here). It's a long album, lasting over an hour, and came at a time when the traditional approaches to listening to an album were dying their last deaths. Thus it has always tended to work best for me on shuffle, where the sequencing is remarkably apt on the fly (the vacuous 44-second "Interlude" notwithstanding). In such fashion, it has wormed its way permanently into my heart. Listening to something like "Out of My League," floating in and out of its pleasures, with its plain-spun attack, its unfeigned innocence and aching joy, and its ability to insinuate so deeply, it's hard to connect back to the various alienations and disaffections of Joy Division and the Smiths, where these fine fellows find their origins. But there you have it. I have a lot of admiration and respect and love for that early groundbreaking work, of course, and in terms of iconoclasm it still has it all over the Electronic project. But I just view the Electronic project as more horizon-broadening, more wall-tearing-down, middle-aged perhaps but worthy in its own right. If this is selling out, I'm buying.

Electronic (1991)

Here's a super-group of another vintage, a collaboration between the Smiths' guitar figurehead Johnny Marr and New Order's man about melody Bernard Sumner (also a guitar player), with both Pet Shop Boys (but especially Neil Tennant) chipping in on a couple of numbers. The result is a reasonably pleasant, occasionally engaging almost-an-hour that spawned a few singles that kinda almost went over the top. In general, the sound tends more closely toward New Order than the Smiths, except when the Pet Shop Boys check in and drape their signature sound all over their main contribution, "The Patience of a Saint" (even the title sounds like PSB product). This was the first and only fruit of the Marr-Sumner collaboration for something like five years, though there was hardly a dearth of work from them otherwise. From the sound of it, everyone got along fine, but I'm not sure there's much spark. I should say, however, as a Pet Shop Boys fan, that I did welcome "Saint" at a point when the act was starting to stretch out three years at a time between albums, so that's something to take into account. (The best thing Tennant ever did with them, "Disappointed," would show up the following year as a single, and was even more welcome—Very not far off by then.) Those with a similar passion for New Order or for Johnny Marr generally might have had similar feelings. But I can't say this album has worn particularly well. As with another New Order side project, by the Other Two, it has its charms but they pale quickly. It's polite, chugs along with its keyboard beats and inflections and washes. Very pretty. Something to pop your fingers to here and there. Most tracks certainly worthy as fodder on mix tapes-cum-CDs, guaranteed to make friends with similar taste sit up and say, "Hey, what's that?" At one time these little promising collaborations seemed to be all over the place—Jack Frost, with the Church's Steve Kilbey and the Go-Betweens' Grant McLennan, was another one, proceeding with a similar kind of careful, cautiously successful vibe. For the most part they all seem now to work best as placeholders, even if they were probably never intended any such way. Thus, 20 years later, you might want to take this overall as a caveat.