Morrissey - Live At Earls Court

Genre rock Publisher Attack/Sanctuary Records External Links Official Website Sanctuary Records

Live albums always make me pause. Rare is the case where one of them falls outside of two categories: middling or awful. Neko Case's The Tigers Have Spoken being that rarest of live releases recently, one that engages the listener in the thrill of capturing an artist live, while still balancing on the tight wire of employing unfamiliar material.

Morrissey's Live At Earls Court doesn't measure up to the high level Case has set the bar at, but I would hesitate to dub it "middling." It is a pleasant listen overall, featuring eighteen songs Moz fans will know and love, most of them done very sincerely and all performed with an even temper.

Not being a fanatic of Moz or his former band The Smiths, hearing some of these songs again was the equivalent of seeing a former high school friend after a decade or so. It is a happy experience, but you don't make plans to hang out again because recapturing that time and place in your lives is really an exercise in futility.

Moz rolls his "R's" delectably during the engaging "First Of The Gang To Die," and the calliope-ish keyboards during "Redondo Beach" are quite amusing. But the preciousness of Moz's lyrics and song titles starts to stack up and overwhelm the light mood the now lounge-ish singer puts forth over this recording. I could almost see him doing a Vegas act ala Bobby Darin.

His passionless vocal on "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" irritates when matched with the original. But he storms back with a spirited version of "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get," perhaps Morrissey's strongest solo single.

Morrissey sums things up nicely at the end of "Bigmouth Strikes Again," when he says matter of factly, "The past is a strange place." Indeed it is. Those that live there are even stranger.