The Smiths
Louder Than Bombs

THE REVIEW

"We are the best band in the world. There's no competition." (Andy Rourke)
"Like Morrissey, I feel that my life was all directed towards Hand In Glove. From then on, things just started happening." (Mike Joyce)
"There haven’t been many bands who have achieved the type of success we have in such a short time. But to be honest: we deserve it. It's not arrogance that makes me say it, but a genuine enthusiasm for the Smiths." (Johnny Marr)
"Our success doesn't surprise me, it all seems rather natural. If anything, I'd be surprised if it were the other way around." (Morrissey)

In 1987, I was 20 years old, and listening to an album like this "Louder than bombs" by the Smiths at that age, you really have to be "louder than bombs" because it can be an exhilarating or devastating experience depending on one's journey and emotional listening situation.
Words like "you can kick me, beat me up and smash my face but you won't change my state of mind because I love you. And is it really that strange? Really that strange? I say no, you say yes, but I know you will change your mind!" (from "Is It Really So Strange?") or "In my life why do I give valuable time to people who don't care if I’m alive or dead? Why should I smile at people I'd rather kick in the face?" (from "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now") are real punches for those experiencing disillusioned first loves or generational misunderstandings so absolutely as at that age, and these "emotional slaps" are nuanced at various levels throughout all 24 tracks of the collection.
"Louder Than Bombs" indeed gathers singles and b-sides from a band that has since become legendary and compiles a double LP (now re-released on a single CD at a special price!) with a significant number of singles released by the group outside the official LPs (for reasons I still can't understand given the beauty and absolute quality of tracks such as Panic, Ask, Shoplifter Of The World and Half A Person).
The band also used the "single" very earnestly and coherently, without today's commercial and marketing manipulations, so much so that it sparked a real Smiths-Mania regarding the collection of their singles for the peculiarity of the covers, still true icons of a "certain way" of understanding the graphical dressing of a music product.

An album that I consider a true "separate" album in every respect, and even now, 20 years later, it brings back the same melancholic and poignant sensations that I lived in a desperately sincere manner on my own skin: that year I was left by my second girlfriend while living besieged between the walls of a Salesian institute, spending civil volunteer service far from home among former addicts and troubled youth... grey, dark moments, full of melancholy and self-pity, I assure you, and anyone who has been there knows.
Yes...here, melancholy and self-pity reign supreme in the beautiful "Half a Person", "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", "Unloveable" or the poignant "Back to the Old House". Songs that are often seen as "mono-tonal" to many and at first superficial listening seem very similar to one another, but which, after repeated listening, manage to bloom in all their throbbing decadent and enlightened beauty, like the self-satisfied monologue of "Rubber Ring", the delicate "Sheila Take A Bow" or the generational anthem of "Shoplifters Of The World Unite".
The pieces are incredibly simple in their complexity (the vaguely 60s atmosphere evoked by Marr's always original composition and arrangements lighten everything, creating an unrepeatable contrast, the most imitated by the groups that followed) and are elevated by the unique and heart-wrenching voice of a Morrissey at the peak of his expressive talent. A Moz who manages to give songs like "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" or "Stretch Out And Wait" that something extra which is then the hallmark that only great artists manage to convey.
But among the various pieces, the real gem that stands out for its poetry and incisiveness remains "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want", a true expressive sum of Morrissey's poetry encapsulated in just over 1 minute (incidentally, plundered 4/5 years later by a beer commercial!).

An absolutely unmissable album and one to listen to at 15, 20, 40, or 60 years old because certain suggestions, certain atmospheres, certain heart mechanisms are ageless and tools like this are most welcome, giving us the keys to access half-open and secret worlds that lie within the depths of our soul, which, as we know, in one way or another, always carries some "wound," more or less deep, to soothe.