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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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It’s with his newest album, Years of Refusal, that Morrissey has delivered one of his finest albums to date.
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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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It's a surprisingly muscular set of punked-up Britpop, spiked with the singer's still-dripping scorn.
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A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.
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Years Of Refusal is Morrissey on top form.
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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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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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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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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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As the album proceeds, Morrissey simply sounds like a superior version of the singer he's always been.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Produced by the late Jerry Finn, the album is a slice of American rock radio, polished, compressed, and routinely combustible.
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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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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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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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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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No, Years of Refusal, though it contains several songs that could be among his best, is no classic.
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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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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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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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As with a lot of Morrissey's latter-day solo material, its target market appears to be people who heard the Smiths and thought: if only this stuff was less beautifully nuanced and original, a bit more ungainly and predictable, then we'd really be getting somewhere.
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Some sublime songs prevail over the adornments.
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MojoYears Of Refusal isn't a great album, but it's no disaster. [Mar 2009, p.104]
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Q MagazineEntertaining though these tracks are, it's hard not to wish that he could ignore the buzzing irritations of not being universally adored, all the time, forever, and concentrate on the big picture. [Mar 2009, p.90]
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