On Morrisey’s 14th solo record, the singer finds himself waxing half-hearted Persian grievances and suffering his own bourgeois indulgences while framed under the unforgiving spotlight of slinky, lounge-act style mixing. Joe Chiccarelli, Morrissey’s long-time producer, should not be held blameless for the glittery, over-sanitized lines heard throughout the record, which only serve to further vulgarize the drab carnage they’re attempting to make palatable. The phrase “make-up on a pig” seems apt here, or simply asking you (the reader) to mentally evoke the image of a benign tumor crooning into a microphone towards the sticky walls of the last remaining bar that’ll have him. There, now you’ve got it.

The first three tracks of the record might strike you as notably terrible until you’ve listened to the entire album and understand that things only get more bizarre from there. You’re Right, It’s Time precedes lead single Make-Up Is A Lie, which is followed by Notre-Dame; the only song even somewhat memorable within the three-track run, if only because the chorus “Notre-Dame, we know who tried to kill you/Notre-Dame, we will not be silent” evokes some level of entertainment in wondering; does Morrissey know something about the 2019 church burning that we don’t?

The first ten minutes of the album are spent leaving the listener to lie in wait while Morrissey spins around in circles, making himself dizzy before flinging darts at random, hoping to land on something that passively irritates him enough to be worth making a record over. Smartphones take a hit, as well as “censorship” (In general, I suppose) and make-up (obviously). The songs are written less so in lyrical verse, and moreso as garish, bumper-sticker slogans slapped across the back of a beautiful, luxury vehicle paid for using the royalties of much better records. But thems was the 80s, and the man who wrote The Queen Is Dead is long gone now. Instead, we are left with ham-fisted choruses that seem to have elected mind-numbing repetition as the best tactic for getting a point across. The songs never seem to go anywhere beyond the calling card of their own titles, and before we’re hardly a quarter into the record, even Morrissey seems bored.

Amazona is refreshing, as it allows you a moment to say hey, that’s a Roxy Music song, and remember a time in which you were listening to a better album. The cover itself is odd, clunky, and edgeless, but somewhat redeemable if you imagine that Morrissey is trying to reconnect somehow with the art that inspired him to become a musician in the first place. This is compounded by the later track Lester Bangs, where Morrissey awkwardly professes a youthful account of looking to the late journalist as some kind of guiding light. “This nerd hangs on your word.” It’s a bit embarrassing, but at least it’s nice to hear Morrissey claim admiration for someone other than himself.

After Amazona, there begins a slogging, four-track run that truly feels like an exercise in patience, though with every wallowing line, you begin to feel doubt creeping into your eardrums that there’s any reward by the end of all this. Boulevard is the album’s lowest point, giving you five and a half minutes to quietly mourn the poor souls that have ever found themselves binge-drinking alongside Morrissey.

Melodic guitars appear seemingly at random to provide the record with some much-needed texture, but considering how short their parts are condensed, the result feels more like a watered-down nod to the existence of British Invasion, quickly swept away alongside other grasping attempts at genre that give up on themselves, shrugging in defeat, every time Morrissey opens his mouth, giving the sense that even his own album is outpacing him. Zoom Zoom The Little Boy, while starting out somewhat bouncy and musically sound, devolves into a deeply abnormal, maudlin sort of Old McDonald, “He wants to save the cats and the dogs and the bats and the frogs/And the badgers and the hedgehogs/He wants to save the cows and the sheep, and the squiggles of the deep/And the fox with the butterfly’s eyes.”

Kerching Kerching is an album highlight, if that’s a scale we can operate with here. Silky synths brighten the sonic landscape, sliding away in time for Morrissey to reach some level of earnestness in the final few minutes of the record. Here, the finger-pointing is momentarily abated, or at least Morrissey is appraising himself alongside the sleazier failings of the world around him. The merlot bottle is empty, the glamorous times of the chateau have passed, and our singer is left simmering in his own discontent in an empty room. An iceberg, an old hat, an endangered species, only able to reveal his own self-awareness in time to deliver the killing blow, “I remember a small boy in a small town/With a small dog and a shy smile/And I wonder what went wrong.”

Order MAKE-UP IS A LIE by Morrissey HERE