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Nothing here is surprising, of course, but Years of Refusal is a full-bodied, full-blooded album that also happens to be fully realized--even if it is on a rather modest scale.
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A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.
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Records as bright and occasionally beautiful as Years Of Refusal make us forgive Morrissey (the artist) even his most juvenile foibles.
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No, Years of Refusal, though it contains several songs that could be among his best, is no classic.
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Love and its bruising unobtainableness remains his chief concern, but with Years Of Refusal some things have changed. For a start there’s less of the stately strings of "Ringleader..." and more of the direct rockabilly of "...Quarry."
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His ninth album, Years of Refusal, stares down existential dread with muscular glam-rock riffs, cheesy synths, heroic mariachi flourishes and a whole lot of punch lines.
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Years Of Refusal is Morrissey on top form.
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Under The RadarWhile it's hard to top some of the early solo work, it's easily his best album in more than a decade, and for the first time in years, he's made a record to stand beside those early classics. [Winter 2009, p.73]
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Not since 1992’s "Your Arsenal" has he combined barbed wit and fast-moving, backward-glancing guitar rock so piercingly.
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Though Moz's vocal range has narrowed with age, he still delivers brilliantly titled odes to depression and hanging out on his own.
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The Manchester Mope now pushes in the opposite direction, ratcheting up the distortion, muscling up on his vocals, and emphasizing live-in-the-studio energy over overdubbed perfection. In the process, he has rarely sounded so urgent.
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It's a surprisingly muscular set of punked-up Britpop, spiked with the singer's still-dripping scorn.
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As the album proceeds, Morrissey simply sounds like a superior version of the singer he's always been.
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It’s a formidable return to his more familiar post-’04 pop form, a better album by any assessment than YATQ.
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This time his band has gelled into an effective stadium-rocking outfit, and his dark humour actually seems connected to some real emotion rather than a strategy designed to create some ironic distance.
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Of the twelve tracks on show, the first eight are endlessly listenable and demonstrate the fact that when on form, Morrissey sure knows how to write a tune.
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With music this uniformly entertaining, it’s best just to quiet down and let the former Stephen Patrick Morrissey do the talking. That's what Years of Refusal confirms as his greatest strength, anyway.
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Years of Refusal is Morrissey's third album this decade, and it is easily his most vital and engaging and maybe even heartbreaking since 1992's "Your Arsenal."
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Years of Refusal feels vibrant as an art of words and images; it’s somehow weaker as music.
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Years of Refusal, his most consistently meaty solo work since 1994's "Vauxhall and I," amps up guitarist Boz Boorer's crunch and crackle to near-felonius degrees.
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In the end, we needn’t concern ourselves too much with the machinations of some emotionally arrested Peter Pan of pop. Moz will always have the last word, anyways, which makes the barb from the album’s closer all the more appropriate: “This might make you throw up in your bed, I’m OK by myself!”
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Though a few tracks like 'That's How People Grow Up' fall back on overused Morrissey formulas, others like the Latin-tinged 'When Last I Saw Carol' add welcome variety.
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Years of Refusal isn't just the loudest thing Morrissey has done in the '00s, it's also the best.
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The question is whether Years Of Refusal finds Morrissey still opening his musical horizons and legs, or reverting to sour type. Predictably for a man whose solo career often seems to be a sadistic exercise in frustration, the answer lies between the two.
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It’s with his newest album, Years of Refusal, that Morrissey has delivered one of his finest albums to date.
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Produced by the late Jerry Finn, the album is a slice of American rock radio, polished, compressed, and routinely combustible.
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Mozzer's ninth solo album is still a good solid guitar-rock record, even though it's his worst since 1997's career nadir, "Maladjusted."
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The difference between mediocre and magnificent Morrissey records tends to be the music, and by that measure, Years of Refusal is the strongest of his three '00s comeback efforts.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 40
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Mixed: 3 out of 40
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Negative: 3 out of 40
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Feb 6, 2023
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Aug 1, 2014
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May 1, 2023