Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors

If Visconti's producing this then this album is gonna be great.

haha, I used to intern at the studio it was recorded at. No comment.

If that's the new title for sure -- love it.

Pretty sure the band had more to do with that being their worst album than Visconti did.

(*dznt bozzer t'hide*)

Visconti produced the Dilford-Tilbrook solo album. Sorry.

Wow! This totally caught be by surprise! I didn't expect a new album so soon....By Moz standards this is a postively Robert Pollard-like pace of recording...

Visconti sounds like a great choice, I'd echo other people sentiments about Quarry's sort of bland production....although I do like about half of that record very very much....

Very excited!

Let's get crunk!

Also, hard, fast songs make him yodel.

- "H.R."

Really, does the world need any more half-baked Morrissey records?

That's coming from someone who owns everything The Smiths did, and plenty-most solo Moz up to "Vauxhall & I"

It's depressing to know all he's likely to do at this point is swing between parody and reasonably dignified mediocrity (in his way) for the rest of his days on stage. Go on you f*cker I dare you to prove me wrong & actually make a vital record.

When you consider someone in the creative process (writing/ thinking / humming) who you quite admire...and then they put out very average stuff, do you more typically see the problem as external factors (producers, labels etc), or do you just imagine that their vital stuff was a happy creative fluke?

Cos as I hear more and more very average Morrissey stuff, and imagine him committing himself to it in the studio, I wonder where his own standards went. I don't think it's just money / contracts / producers etcf. I don't think he has the ear he used to. OK, or the collaborators.

I'm thinking lately of Joan Didion, who for part of a 60s/70s/80s stretch could do no wrong, then wrote books of, in my opionion, increasing irrelevancy. (Also Don Delillo.) Not bad books, books which continue to be continually critically lauded (gaining in DD's case even greater mainstream success) but which to me lack the razor sharp cultural insights of the earlier works.

People grow older and mellow, and can be both hemmed in and sustained by their iconic status granted to them, say 20 years earlier (Lou Reed, David Bowie).

The title sounds a bit clownish: I forsee more costuming public appearances.

I think the only way to successfully maintain the iconic status would be to continue to operate outside of the mainstream music biz, to embrace "outsiderness" (Scott Walker) but the flipside of that is a lack of audience.

I don't know, I don't follow Dylan, but he seems to retain his enigma, but his "genius"? That's for the fans to say.

In other news, Leonard Cohen's assistant apparently funneled his retirement fund into her own bank account, while he was practicing zen.

Then again, the rehabilitation of Elvis's 70s career could be the flipside to the argument, but it comes in retrospect.

I have to say that I find that album strangely overrated -- as nearly everything on it is on Beethoven is Dead, which I completely love, I can only say that the Mick Ronson production is just less important (or simply not as striking) to my ears than it might be for many others.

In this Harry Potter age that is a incredibly bad title.

I think that's in purpose, no ? (which one, i dunno...)
and by the way, that's a fairly good description of what he looks like now !

Yay! I love "You Know I Couldn't Last" but lots of people and reviews I read seemed to think it sucked....

I dunnO I just find it hard to care anymore, but I suppose that's personal opinion. I am outta this thread.

Damn. The final "squalor of the mind" falsetto part alone is enough for it to be a great song!

Or perhaps I am just trying to steel myself against the inevitable Morrissey thetans that will battle for my soul circa early 2006 (current projected release date/world tour domination etc).

So was "Irish Blood English Heart." And possibly "You Know I Couldn't Last." And some of the b-sides are amazing.

Yes. I could not believe that the Mozzer threw away "Don't Make Fun of Daddy's Voice" and "Friday Mourning" as b-sides last time around. Had he included tose two tracks on Quarry in place of, say, "All the Lazy Dykes" and whatever your other least favorite track is, you're looking at a classic album. During the glory years of the Smiths, he could afford to throw away classic tracks as b-sides. He doesn't have that luxury now.

ihttp://images.morrissey-solo.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/observerpic1.jpg

As for the much trumpeted OMM Morrissey/Douglas Coupland interview: 'I've decided Morrissey is basically impervious to interviews, so I won't bother. Will this do, DC?'

The NBT list has been complaining about it all day.

&

Hurrah for Nabisco's accurate post above re. sexuality.

orchestation for strings and gathering of children's choir for many of the songs

his work on this album is amazing! has he collaborated with other pop stars?

http://www.nme.com/news/morrissey/22563

Morrissey has apologised to the Arctic Monkeys if he recent comments about them caused offence.

The singer was quoted criticising the band's rapid success while at the South By South West festival last week (March 15), suggesting it was too soon and "a bit unnatural".

However Morrissey has issued a further statement to NME.COM, explaining he was not criticising the Sheffield newcomers.

"I'm sorry that the comments I made at SouthBySouthWest about the Arctic Monkeys were printed so harshly in The Times and the NME," states Morrissey.

"I actually quite like the Arctic Monkeys and whatever I said was said with tender, avuncular concern. I hope to God I didn't upset their grannies," he added.

"In any case, I was wrong about their success being too sudden and without any dues paid, because that's exactly how it happened for The Smiths. So, I really should shut it."

--

Alexis Petridis
Friday March 24, 2006
The Guardian

It is hard to express the shock delivered five minutes and 18 seconds into Ringleader of the Tormentors by the sudden appearance of Morrissey's testicles. Until that point, everything has been much as you might expect. Opener I Will See You in Far-Off Places has grinding glam guitars and a couple of waspish one-liners. The second track proceeds with a stately, lovely piano figure, a funereal organ and the image of Morrissey strolling through his adopted hometown of Rome in the usual melancholy haze, "so very tired of doing the right thing". And then, up pop his testicles.

His only previous pronouncement on this subject came 20 years ago: "I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke." And indeed, Morrissey's testicles are no normal testicles. Judging by the metaphor here, they are massively distended, swollen - presumably by decades of loudly trumpeted celibacy - until they resemble "explosive kegs between my legs". "Dear God," he adds, as indeed you might if you were trying to walk through the Eternal City while suffering from distended testicles, "please help me."

God is apparently listening, for relief swiftly arrives in a manner so startling that the thought of Morrissey's combustible crown jewels, which seconds before seemed like the most diverting image rock music was likely to serve up for the foreseeable future, are instantly forgotten. Over the next few lines, Morrissey is cruised ("Will you follow me and know more than you do?"), seduced ("And now he motions to me with his hand on my knee") and finally finds himself "parting your legs with mine in between".

One shouldn't be startled to hear a middle-aged man singing about having sex with another man, but this is Morrissey, who has spent 30 years deflecting questions about his sexuality by claiming that he didn't have sex with anyone. Twenty-three years after offering the most memorable come-on in pop history - "you can pin and mount me," suggested the Smiths' Reel Around the Fountain, "like a butterfly" - here he is, finally admitting that someone has taken him up, so to speak.

The subsequent relief yields one of the loveliest and most affecting moments of his entire career: strings soar, drums thump and Morrissey's voice vanishes slowly into the distance, singing: "The heart feels free, the heart feels free." He sounds contented, which proves oddly touching - and that there's a first time for everything.

This being a Morrissey album, however, happiness can't last. Within seconds of Dear God, Please Help Me's slow dissolve, he is singing a song called You Have Killed Me and comparing himself to film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who compellingly illustrated the downside of trawling the vias for a shag, when a bit of rough trade he picked up in Ostia ran him over with his own Alfa Romeo.

Much of Ringleader of the Tormentors is given over to fretting about the effect that admitting sexual satisfaction - or, apparently more disastrous still, love - might have on Morrissey's image. "I am the same underneath," protests the album's remarkable centrepiece, Life Is a Pigsty, as if trying to reassure both his fans and himself. The following song is titled I'll Never Be Anybody's Hero Now. It's all a bit ridiculous - in the admittedly unlikely event that Morrissey was filmed throttling a kitten, thousands of fans would storm the chatrooms claiming it was the kitten's fault - but nevertheless, this seems to have inspired some of his most impressive songs in years.

Life Is a Pigsty is woozy and hallucinatory; bedecked with white noise and weird sound effects, it builds to a thrilling, timpani-laden climax. At Last I Am Born is a fabulously overblown, deliriously joyful closer that marks the events detailed in Dear God, Please Help Me and their aftermath with a self-aggrandising cry of: "Historians note!" Mercifully, those events also seem to have obliterated the memory of being successfully sued by Smiths drummer Mike Joyce, which led Morrissey to fill 2004's You Are the Quarry with the kind of songs that people who hate Morrissey thinks he writes: depressing, swingeing, self-pitying.

There was also a sense that You Are the Quarry was handicapped by the stinginess that landed him in court in the first place, awash as it was with cheap, synthesised strings. Here, the violins are not only real, but scored by Ennio Morricone. T Rex producer Tony Visconti lends everything a muscular authority. They have even splashed out on a children's choir, who turn The Youngest Was the Most Loved's refrain - "there is no such thing in life as normal" - into something impossibly moving.

To get the praise into perspective, it's not the Smiths: hiring all the famous names in the world won't re-create the magical, mysterious synergy at the heart of Half a Person or How Soon Is Now? But Ringleader of the Tormentors has a mystery and magic of its own.

I have many thoughts on ROTT, but what I just want to say right now is that as a long-time fan who has seen Morrissey in concert well over 50 times and has purchased all of his releases in several formats over, ROTT is a great disappointment.

There are a few very good songs, but most of it is heart-stabbingly mediocre for duh Man. More than half the album is simply unbearable for me, and I have tried very hard to like it. However, I'm looking forward to the b-sides, as Morrissey has a perversely outstanding record of b-sides blowing away album tracks.

Perhaps it will be on You Tube.

These here queer themes used to be subtle enough to disappear, otherwise I might have been put off back in the block party era, when I wouldn't have wanted anyone to think I was a poof. I know, strange, but true. I think this subtlety is good anyway.

"Pasolini is me" seems to me to be a very poor line, regardless of backstory. But I haven't heard the song.

I wish I wish I wish I could have got a ticket for the Reading Hexagon.

I don't want to read anyone else's review. Is JtN the only person to like Maladjusted? I have never heard it.

I have been listening to Johnny Marr with Billy Bragg, Greetings To The New Brunette. Very good, very expressive fretwork. No wonder Morrissey solo is not as good as the Smiths.

I dunno, though, isn't that pretty much how it happened for the Smiths, I thought I'd read that they basically played a few set-up gigs in Manchester, then it was pretty much onto the big time wasn't it? I bet the Arctic Monkeys prolly toured more before getting big than the Smiths did....

So, instead of investing the money he apparently doesn't want from his Canadian fans in clean industries in the poor fishing regions in the North where the annual seal hunt ensures the survival of the communities, he boycotts the whole country.

There's a fine line between having principles and annoying the shit out of your fans time and time again, but Moz ain't near that line at all. (old Smiths boot, live in Spain: "we've seen your national sport, and it isn't very nice" right before Meat Is Murder - yes, just like those Spaniards were all personally responsible for bullfighting, your Canadian fans are all seal hunters)

One day I will tire of saying that. Either that or get stoned to death.

1. Bachelor in a Casserole
2. The Swirling Clergyman’s Lament
3. St. Sebastian’s Disused Quiver
4. Dolorous Dolores
5. Gracious Knows These Trousers Bind

stolen from here

Love the production and some of the arrangments....Visconti did a great job.

Unfortunatly I don't think there's ONE song on this thing that anyone will remember in a year....

...it's making me wish that this band/producer could have done Quarry, which at least had a handful of great songs.

To Me You Are a Work of Art might be the worst thing he's ever done.

This is no Malajusted.

I'm surprised he would have any conflict at all about his sexuality at this point. I mean, I laugh when people claim he's not gay. Hasn't it been obvious from the first Smiths album onwards?

Morissey is God.

this album is intolerable. yikes, even worse now than i thought it was when it came out.

i bought this a while ago but never got round to really appreciating it till just recently.

in many ways morrissey's vocals are sounding as vital as ever, and the record has a lot more variety than i might have expected.

many highlights, but i'm particularly enjoying 'the father who must be killed' just now