[rating=9.00]
Any album that opens with a didgeridoo and a cavalry of finger cymbals deserves at least one listen. Morrissey’s gorgeous tenth record, World Peace Is None of Your Business, demands many more—despite an early lecture on global meddling. “Each time you vote, you support the process,” he taunts in his velvet croon several times on the shimmering title track.
Recorded over six weeks in the south of France, World Peace captures Morrissey’s best songs in years. “Earth Is the Loneliest Planet” came first and is the album’s catchiest, weaving the harp, flamenco strings, and the accordion into a danceable rant on pollution. Once Gustavo Manzur’s squeezebox sucks in air, you’re caught somewhere between dread and delight. Later, on “Staircase At the University,” happy horns and handclaps accompany a father threatening to disown his daughter if she doesn’t ace three classes.
Helming World Peace is Joe Chiccarelli, the first producer to work with Morrissey since Jerry Finn died in 2008. Many of these songs were cut in single-day day sessions, with little rehearsal. Chiccarelli’s stadium-sized touch on albums by My Morning Jacket and Young the Giant (a Morrissey favorite) is felt here, helping these twinkling arrangements outshine the moments of sonic shrillness from recent records like Years of Refusal and You Are the Quarry.
Morrissey once described Matt Walker’s drumming as “a seismographic shudder,” and it’s his ruthless pounding that brings much of the roll to this band’s first record in five years. On what might be the classiest takedown of machismo ever, “I’m Not A Man,” Moz skewers beef and bros, unleashing on everyone but Paula, the recording studio’s chocolate Labrador, with whom he is pictured on the World Peace cover. Morrissey’s past covers have often featured him clutching something: a microphone phallus; a machine gun; a violin; a baby boy. This time he’s armed with a pen—perhaps a reference to his recent autobiography?
What Morrissey has mastered is making morbid songs somehow vaguely uplifting, just before delivering an icy punchline. On the two-minute “The Bullfighter Dies,” he protests the barbaric tradition by killing off the matador:
“Nobody cries,” he sings, “Because we all want the bull to survive.”
