Operation Appreciation: The Smiths - The Queen is Dead

Another rainy day in Massachusetts, and as the drizzle dripped along my windshield, I decided to put on The Queen is Dead, a rainy day classic. Perhaps the refraining "Oh mother, I can feel the soil pouring over my head" from "I Know It's Over" makes me feel like this is a good weather-to-music match. Surely, though, nobody does this kind of gloomy theatricality better than The Smiths on this record.

 

I'll readily admit that this is one of the more softball entries in The Desert Island series. This was the first Smiths album I ever bought. It remains my favorite Smiths album to this day (though their self-titled debut and the compilation Hatful of Hollow both have slots on The Desert Island Playlist). I'm not going to mince words: nobody, but nobody, does this kind of sorrowful pop music better than The Smiths. Not like this. Wedding Present and Suede's music echoes it, but they don't have the same balance that makes it seem so damned cool to feel life's low moments. Cool to say, "I never want to go home/because it's not my home/it's their home/I'm welcome no more" or to say, "now I know how Joan of Arc felt/as the flame rose to her Roman nose and her walkman started to melt."

 

In a perverse twist, the band chose to end it the hilarious "Some Girls Are Bigger than Others." It's a simple song with very few words. After the weight of "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out," (romance-as-one-grand-gesture if I ever saw it!) closing the album with "Some Girls Are Bigger than Others" takes it from cute throwaway to album highlight. "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out," though is also one of the definitive Smiths songs.

 

Going back and listening to The Queen is Dead, though, I get sidetracked and think about the new Best-Of package due out in a couple weeks (The Sound of the Smiths). It's heartening that Morrissey and Johnny Marr are working together (sort of/I guess) to put it together, but where are remasters of the albums themselves? Hopefully, Rhino Records is following its standard pattern of "best-of then remasters" and we'll have a CD of The Queen is Dead with better sound quality and a couple bonus tracks.

Expect it on some rainy day in the future.

The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (YouTube)
The Smiths - There Is a Light that Never Goes Out (YouTube)