The Smiths
Meat Is Murder

THE REVIEW

Every time I pick up this vinyl (yes, you read that right, that big black disc that was all the rage about ten years ago) I get a lump in my throat and an indescribable tightness in my chest. I believe I have in my hands one of the most significant records of my youth (sigh!) and, despite having the best intentions, I know that I WILL NOT be able to be objective nor detached and cold while reviewing it.

Well, with this album Morrissey, Marr, and company reach, in my opinion, their artistic peak in terms of songwriting quality and everything the Smiths represented in the '80s and beyond. Songs like "The Headmaster Ritual" or "How Soon Is Now?" or "What She Said", just to name a few, are the quintessence of the Smiths' world, the quintessential condensation of their/our philosophy. Then there's the haunting "Meat is Murder" with its slow and desperate pace to the sound of electric saws that accompany us like cattle to the slaughter, a true manifesto of that "militant vegetarianism" that would find followers everywhere in the years to come. And should we say something about the absolute masterpiece of the album, the splendid "Well I Wonder"? More than a song, it's an icon of an entire generation, the perfect meeting of the most desolate melancholy in contrast with the distinctly 60's tempo of the piece. Phrases like "I want the one I can't have" or "barbarism begins at home" or when Morrissey candidly declares "meat is murder"... well, then I think that indeed a band like this had things to say that I rarely hear from today's bands.

Nostalgic folly? Perhaps... I only know that when I listen to this record again (which I rebought on the remastered CD), well... it's as if my immune defenses drop and the entire armor of an integrated 40-year-old family man goes to hell and out emerges that bespectacled and itchy teenager who was moshing, gyrating, and rebelling twenty and more years ago... that virtual boy that each of us carries inside and that occasionally needs to be resurrected for his own good and for the benefit of the 40-year-old who carries him inside.

Indeed, yes, I strayed off course and rambled on the end, but so it goes... the blame lies with certain 33s, small and black, that are a part of you like the moles we all have on our skin.