Low in High School, his 11th solo album, is as dazzling and infuriating as anything in his canon, full of the stuff that has made the 58-year-old former Smiths frontman one of the most provocative and adored stars of our time.
The bar for his new one, Low In High School, was so low as to be practically underground. He’s managed to claw himself out of that hole, bouncing back with what might be his best album since 2004’s You Are The Quarry. And though it doesn’t match Morrissey’s achievements from, let’s say, 1982 until 1994, that’s also not really a fair hurdle to expect him to climb.
Low in High School can seem as aurally conflicted as it is politically, and that may be an appropriate look for Morrissey in 2017: He's opted for a mad world of his own creation and doesn't much care whether his fans follow or not.
His 11th solo studio album Low in High School is a mixed bag of brilliance and dross. There are some genuinely interesting new explorations while other tracks are deeply disappointing. Disconcertingly uneven, yes, but not safely predictable.
If you were never a fan of Morrissey, then, yeah, fuck this album, and fuck him too. But, if you’ve loved his music since The Smiths, and their music actually brings you joy, well, then there are things to be found on Low in High School that could possibly, maybe, present a solid argument for attempting to find a way to suck the goodness from this album … while spitting out the pulp that is Morrissey himself.
If later solo highlights like 2004’s You Are the Quarry felt like catching up with an old friend, Morrissey’s music is now more like scrolling through their Twitter feed and remembering why you stopped hanging out in the first place.
The ex-Smiths frontman’s Low In High School is another addition to the ever-weakening Moz canon, a decline that started, frankly, with the B-side of Strangeways Here We Come and continues to fall into a seemingly bottomless pit of snide despair.
These days he sounds like he simply doesn’t understand human beings any more, and Low in High School is often little more than the utterly disengaged pronouncements of a wealthy hermit, who needs to get out of his LA mansion a little more often.
While the earlier album showed renewed gallows intensity, this is in many ways his weakest album since Kill Uncle.
While there’s no denying that Low In High School is more musically exploratory than usual, drawing from glam rock, electropop, tango and Tropicalismo, the singer himself has rarely exhibited such a grating combination of spite and self-pity.
On Low in High School, it's hard not to hear Morrissey as an old dog who's watching the world pass him by. He's increasingly content to preach to the converted, limiting his audience to those who can put up with his crotchety ways—a stubborn streak that's a little less charming with every passing year.
Low In High School is the latest in a long string of wet sausages that Morrissey has cruelly inserted into the ears of his audience. It’s hard to understand why his followers don’t storm off instead, for good.
/ | Radio X |