POLL Your Life: The Morrissey "Kill Uncle" thread

Don't discount Bona Drag. I know it's a compilation, but it plays like a real album.

Anyway, Mute Witness.

King Leer, close second to The End of the Family Line.

Love this album.

I rediscovered this after being so disappointed by Years of Refusal. That was so noisy and overblown and this is so subtle and catchy. I much prefer his voice here as well, the soft crooning really suits him. His voice is so stretched on YoR.

Went with Our Frank.

The bottomless echo here is really fetching, I think.

I voted for "Our Frank." Is there any reason why it never makes his single comps?

Because it's really, really terrible?

gah I shouldn't be here, sorry

The second side is a little dull tbh.

Because it's really, really terrible?

I'm curious – how so?

"The Harsh Truth..." was his worst tune to date.

I'm curious – how so?

The song sounds like it was slapped together by inebriated students who thought they were being incredibly clever and insightful but only managed to get to smugly strident. His melody is meandering, which is fine, but also directionless, which is not very cool. The piano part especially is an afterthought in the final mix of the song and the drums are really, really, really soft and messy. The effects put on the guitar set my teeth on edge. There just isn't a single thing about it that I find redeemable. (Well, that's not true; had the arrangement been different the "oh stop me from thinking all the time" part could have been salvageable.)

See, I like how one of those melodies just seems to stop before the "Your frankly vulgar red pullover" part. I also like the quasi-Middle Eastern (sampled?) violin intro and how the effects and reverb put some distance between himself and the scenario he's drawing.

This was the first mozzer album that was on my radar, too. Thankfully, Bona Drag was the first one I actually owned b/c I don't think this one could have done the trick of indoctrinating me into the cult on its own merits. Not that it is bad per se, its mediocrity is just made more pronounced by the brilliance of that which came before & after: an oasis of blah in a desert of awesome.

had a tough time choosing between "Sing Your Life" and "There's a Place..."

I went for the former - mainly because I love how its jaunty rockabilly pacing makes it really fun to sing along. Which kinda lets you play out his "everyman has his own voice" message contained within.

Love the last track for entirely sentimental reasons, it struck me at the time in a particularly resonant way. And therefore has stayed with me, though I actually really prefer the live version on one of that era's singles (My Love Life?)

Overall I love this album more than I should - it has some really awful lyrics. But somehow just works really well.

xpost: That said, I'll go with TAPIHFMAMF for personal, sentimental reasons: For a while, it was taken as an anthem of solidarity among a core group of friends an myself (this was when I was in eighth grade, at a time when solidarity amongst friends was the kind of thing that was quantified & soundtracked).

I wish we could have had more of this Morrissey, actually -- this odd squishy studio Morrissey. I'm kinda struggling to form a thought about the sound and mood of this record -- how they were kinda perfect for a young Morrissey-lover when this came out, how that was sort the last moment they were remotely fashionable, and how I wonder if eventually that immediate "dating" of it will pass and it'll just seem incredibly interesting. (Not holding breath, but I do love the record.)

^ Maybe the way to form that thought is to say this wound up having to be the end point of Morrissey's 80s, basically? That there are a bunch of things about his self-presentation on this that are really late-80s studio "indie," in a way I'm pretty fond of, and then the way the wind blew with the alt-rock boom made that stuff very suddenly less cool, and in came the "muscular" guitar-band thing he's been with ever since.

It's striking how KU and Your Arsenal represent such canny iterations of the zeitgeist – the former, like you said, attracting several strains of English pop into itself, the latter a gauntlet thrown at Britpop.

for the record I thought YA was a horrible betrayal upon its release. It took most of the year for me to warm to it. Like nabisco, I loved the reverb- and keyboard-drenched Moz of "Piccadilly Palare" and "Our Frank" too much.

I wish this poll included "Tony The Pony" (from the US version). It's my favorite, hands down. From the options here I'm gonna go with "Sing Your Life".

I'm trying to think of other things that fit into this category -- late-80s British indie that had gotten, in American terms, totally Drama Club, and then post-1991 sorta had to adapt or fade away. A lot of the things that come to mind are solo records from singers, like Peter Murphy's Deep or Ian McCulloch's Candleland ... there's a pop sound on these things that just lost a ton of its sustainability during 91/92.

xpost - yeah, exactly, Alfred; it was like by 93 nobody could wear that shirt anymore, everyone had to bring out the guitars and put on a new face. (Moz, to his credit, did it awfully well for a while, though he certainly got down to some stuff during those Bad Years that felt false and going-through-the-motions)

I'd include the Lloyd Cole of "She's a Girl and I'm a Man" and Robyn Hitchcock's Perspex Island as big English crossover college hits whose likes would never grace the American college charts again.

when this came out i remember finding the transition from KU to YA jarring enough to put me off of solo moz records for quite a long time. it seemed terribly not-right in some ineffable way.

note that this was not my first exposure to solo moz, as by the time this came out, i felt that this was a new album by someone i already knew and loved. and i liked this album ok when it came out, less than viva hate certainly but "sing your life" brought me some good times.

anyway, this album totally feels like the tail end of something.

xp -- also i had all three of those albums (perspex, lloyd cole, and KU)! what a sheep i was.

I did too!

RE: Peter Murphy & Ian McCulloch - Mysterio & Holy Smoke show those artists losing their footing on the upheaval of stylistic trends, both released on the heels of Madchester & the first upswing of the grunge, unsure whether to stick with old production standards or where to go, really. HS has aged better, I feel, but I remember both sounding out of place & instantly dated at the time.

Oh yeah, these are great examples! Now I sort of want to make myself a mix of this stuff, but it'd probably just turn into a hybrid of a Just Say... comp and the first 120 Minutes CD.

I can think of a few acts that kept that kind of sound and feel going, but just not in a way where they were taken seriously by the same audience -- e.g., the Lightning Seeds got to keep doing it a little longer, just because they were a fluffy pop group nobody swore by and didn't require cred. (Also wasn't it just after this moment that Duran Duran got some comeback hits out of a somewhat related sound, with that Wedding Album?)

Actually I have no idea why "Ordinary World" was so huge – a power ballad vacuum? Hair metal bands stopped walking the earth in early '93.

BTW I should confess that my favorite Hitchcock album might actually be Respect, for reasons that are actually really similar to my liking Kill Uncle -- another odd endpoint of this sort of thing. (Haha whereas I dislike XTC's Nonsuch for kinda boning it on this exact same moment/problem.)

xp - "Come Undone" did really well too, if I remember right!

I suppose Peter Gabriel's Us deserves a spot here too.

Do Erasure count? They more euro-disco to begin with, but they were often lumped in with other Brit-indies & they certainly did not change their sound, yet managed to have hits consistently through the 90s. The AC/DC of sensitive techno-pop?

Hair metal bands stopped walking the earth in early '93. - Actually, the more enterprising of them just switched to adult-contemporary. How else do you account for Bon Jovi's longevity. See also: Firehouse.

I don't think this sound was over by 91/92, nor was it purely British: you had Porno For Pyros hitting in the summer of 93 (and was a Billboard #3 album!, with "Pets" a Modern Rock #1). In terms of "modern rock" I think the first Weezer record (summer of 94) had a lot to do with pushing out quirkier non-rock sounds, as did Dookie that summer. But the summer of 93 was a great time for the sound you're describing, at least as I'm understanding it.

voted "Our Frank" btw

Lookit these:

Billboard's Number One Modern Rock Songs - 1992

i blame the cheesification of paul westerberg on this a little bit

wow, Tears for Fears had a modern rock #1 in the summer of 93.

I think The Loop is a b-side from this album. Great track and really fun to see live. Pregnant For The Last Time has that rockabilly vibe that fits with this album too.

I regard "Pregnant" as the transitional single, actually.

what a weird time for music for me. I was just starting college (well just dropping out of college and re-entering) when all of this music was around, my days were endless stretches of reading lit, listening to music like this, and smoking weed. Maybe the last relaxed days of my life. But oddly I avoid almost all of this stuff and came to hate it immensely in the years following; but these days on the rare occasion that I put this album (or candleland, or mysterio) on, I find it kind of transcendent. Obviously everyone hated this album at the time but I thought it was fairly good if way too short. It's not as bad as its reputation and has been redeemed by several worse albums Morrissey has foisted on us.

i came to the conclusion that this album was the end of 80s anglophilia for me. after this i started listening to pavement, archers, afghan whigs, dino jr, american indie etc. and england seemed very far away. too far.

It is between "Sing Yr Life" and "Mute Witness" for me, I think.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

my god, are people beginning to rehabilitate Kill Uncle?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I have to agree with daavid, Tony the Pony from the American release is my favorite as well, can't imagine why it didn't make the UK release. My first ever concert was Morrissey on the Kill Uncle tour, so I've always liked it a lot more than most people I know. I find that I still really enjoy a lot of the songs even now--it has held up surprisingly well.

that tour broke my heart.