Released in early 1984 after a couple of singles (and rapturous British press) had built up a buzz around the band, The Smiths is a terrific record, and also a slightly frustrating one: It's not quite the Smiths as we know them. To have come up with the tone and riffs of "What Difference Does It Make?" or "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" or "London" would be a coup for any guitarist to have come up with all of them is astonishing. It's safe to say that nobody else, before or since, has opened a significant rock album by hammering the bejesus out of the capoed, open-tuned chord that begins "The Headmaster Ritual"- Marr has called his riff what Joni Mitchell "would have done had she been an MC5 fan." There also aren't a lot of new wave classics with guitar lines inspired by Ghanaian highlife (and a rhythm section that's basically just playing "You Can't Hurry Love"), but then there's "This Charming Man" to prove the rest of the world wrong. Instead, he worked up a different sound and technique for nearly every song in the band's discography-the breadth of his inventiveness is a good part of what's important about him. It's hard to neatly describe what was so great about Marr, because he didn't have a particular gimmick or a signature sound there are virtually no audible guitar solos on Smiths records. And they had guitarist and writer Johnny Marr, who was responsible for at least half of the Smiths' glory. They had a magnificent rhythm section in bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, who were unflashy, tough, and supple. And his lyrics and delivery were very, very deeply steeped in the history of gay culture, not least that in that they mimed something like being closeted: Morrissey's claims to celibacy, and early Smiths' lyrical revulsion about sex in general, are kind of hilarious in the light of, say, shirtless Joe Dallessandro appearing on the cover of their first album.īut the Smiths weren't Morrissey-plus-some-musicians, despite what he'd later try to suggest. (Or, for that matter, men's singing voices, or what lyrics could and couldn't say, or whether or not it was a good idea to sing lines twice in a row if he was particularly proud of them.) His singing, then as now, was wildly affected and wildly virtuosic, bursting with growls and whoops and sly over-enunciations. The most obvious source of their genius was their singer, lyricist, and spokesman, Morrissey, a career eccentric who idolized Oscar Wilde and took a similar delight in pissing off anyone who had preconceived notions about masculinity. (One of the small pleasures of working backward through pop history from the Smiths is stumbling across Sandie Shaw's "Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now" or Reparata and the Delrons' "Shoes", for instance, and thinking ohhh, now I get it.) This box of newly remastered editions of their albums- four studio records, three compilations of the singles and one-offs that were their greater strength, one live obligation- would cement their reputation for brilliance and perversity, if it needed cementing.įrom the Smiths' first single, "Hand in Glove", in the spring of 1983, to their breakup barely four years later, everything about them seemed like a considered and ingenious decision: their name's undertones of both facelesness and creativity, the way each of their records began with a different sort of guitar tone, the tinted monochrome photos on their sleeves, their proudly ashamed fascination with their home town of Manchester, the three-song EPs they released every few months as bulletins of their evolution, their shoplifting excursions through the used-singles bins of British popular music. There have been better bands than the Smiths, but there has never been a more perfect band, in the sense of having a distinct, deliberate, powerful aesthetic shaped by the tensions of collaboration, combined with the ability to articulate that aesthetic.
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