I don't think Kill Uncle is THAT bad

[Qvist]

I did not mean to suggest the discrepancy was down to age. There are vast swathes of recorded music that I love listening to that were recorded in the 60s, 70s...even the 1980s! Productions that sound far warmer and more 'real' and alive than most material I hear in these dull digital days. And I just wonder why The Smiths never sounded as good as that music. I think finance was probably a bigger factor than we'd like to think, but I do believe that it was at least in part an artistic and aesthetic decision. Them were rotten days in the 80s. It was a binary age. You had to take a stand on one side or the other, on everything, from Free Market Capitalism to Fairlight synthesizers. And part of The Smiths kitchen sink, anti-glamour aesthetic was their cheap as chips, MW radio sound. In opposition to yer Bob Clearmountain/Mutt Lange/Trevor Horn type sounds. As was the way with The Smiths this ended up actually becoming glamourous! But one quarter century on, it doesn't work.

Yes it does. I think it sounds great - more so, in fact, now than I thought then.

In general, that is, because there is hardly such a thing as a single Smiths sound. Actually, I doubt you could find any band with such diverse production over such a brief period.

You have the debut album, with its distinctive (and in my opinion not very successful) production - heavy, compact, caged-in.

Then you have Hatful of Hollow and the Peel sessions - raw and naked, with a lot of room given to the guitar.

Then there's Meat is Murder (at least a part of the way) and TQID and TWWL, who I think have really nice, balanced production that sounds more accomplished but retains the drive and freshness of the previous recordings.

Finally, there is the abomination known as Strangeways Here We Come, which has a complex, luscious and attractive sound. Unfortunately the woolly layers of spaced-out sound also completely kills the drive and dynamism that was such a key part of the earlier recordings, which is the main reason why I have found it such a perennial disappointment since I first heard it.


The problems I have with these are the same ones I had at the time. I wish they'd have let Troy Tate produce the first album, he was truly on to the right thing judging from the Tate Sessions - above all, centering the sound around Marr's guitar melody, as heard f.e. on Pretty Girls Make Graves. The later records sound great to me, still (although Strangeways still sounds good in a way that undermines the music). After 25 years, I love the sound of Hatful better than ever - the stripped-down rawness just suits the music so marvellously.

 

[joe frady]

Yes it does. I think it sounds great - more so, in fact, now than I thought then.

In general, that is, because there is hardly such a thing as a single Smiths sound. Actually, I doubt you could find any band with such diverse production over such a brief period.

You have the debut album, with its distinctive (and in my opinion not very successful) production - heavy, compact, caged-in.

Then you have Hatful of Hollow and the Peel sessions - raw and naked, with a lot of room given to the guitar.

Then there's Meat is Murder (at least a part of the way) and TQID and TWWL, who I think have really nice, balanced production that sounds more accomplished but retains the drive and freshness of the previous recordings.

Finally, there is the abomination known as Strangeways Here We Come, which has a complex, luscious and attractive sound. Unfortunately the woolly layers of spaced-out sound also completely kills the drive and dynamism that was such a key part of the earlier recordings, which is the main reason why I have found it such a perennial disappointment since I first heard it.


The problems I have with these are the same ones I had at the time. I wish they'd have let Troy Tate produce the first album, he was truly on to the right thing judging from the Tate Sessions - above all, centering the sound around Marr's guitar melody, as heard f.e. on Pretty Girls Make Graves. The later records sound great to me, still (although Strangeways still sounds good in a way that undermines the music). After 25 years, I love the sound of Hatful better than ever - the stripped-down rawness just suits the music so marvellously.

Elegantly put case friend
I just wish I could agree. I'd like to hear what you hear, but I just don't. If anything the album whose sound I find most attractive is actually 'Strangeways'.
My blue is not your blue, etcetera....
But you have inspired me to listen again with fresh ears. The weekend awaits

 

[Qvist]

Undeniably true, of course. In a sense, I agree with you about Strangeways. It sounds lovely and really nice. But to me, that's exactly the problem.

 

[Worm]

I did not mean to suggest the discrepancy was down to age. There are vast swathes of recorded music that I love listening to that were recorded in the 60s, 70s...even the 1980s! Productions that sound far warmer and more 'real' and alive than most material I hear in these dull digital days. And I just wonder why The Smiths never sounded as good as that music. I think finance was probably a bigger factor than we'd like to think, but I do believe that it was at least in part an artistic and aesthetic decision. Them were rotten days in the 80s. It was a binary age. You had to take a stand on one side or the other, on everything, from Free Market Capitalism to Fairlight synthesizers. And part of The Smiths kitchen sink, anti-glamour aesthetic was their cheap as chips, MW radio sound. In opposition to yer Bob Clearmountain/Mutt Lange/Trevor Horn type sounds. As was the way with The Smiths this ended up actually becoming glamourous! But one quarter century on, it doesn't work.
But I can listen to Beatles, Bowie, Can, Roxy, Blondie, etc, from a half century ago and it sounds fresher than ever.
Yes, clearly, great songs iz great songs. And a great song was never made shit by bad production, but.....I'm never 'appy!
Aaah, if only they could have sounded as good as 'The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye'........

It is a bitter irony, isn't it? That "The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye" sounds better than "Hand In Glove"?

If the sound bothers you, it bothers you. In my humble, the production is so drab it actually makes the songs better; in a paradox, the fact that the production couldn't kill the songs makes them stronger. Morrissey, Johnny, Andy and Mike still shine through heroically; the songs come through as if they were Platonic perfections imperfectly realized in our phenomenal realm. I felt this way just recently, watching the clip of Marr playing "This Charming Man" on a four-track. It was like watching a shaman casting a spell. The Smiths plucked freely from the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit and no amount of knob-twiddling could spoil the spoils they brought down for the benefit of humanity. "Hand In Glove" exists as a timeless cosmic Ideal. "The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye" is just a track on some record.

 

[Worm]

Undeniably true, of course. In a sense, I agree with you about Strangeways. It sounds lovely and really nice. But to me, that's exactly the problem.

I'm with you to an extent. It does sound a little too sterile and vacant in places. This is precisely why "Rank" became my favorite Smiths album after about, oh, 1996 or 1997. There's a "living" sound of The Smiths which the ear starts to pick out. (Yes, I have only one ear.)

Nevertheless, may I suggest one mitigating factor? Thank you. "Strangeways" has a different production quality to it, but the songs themselves were differently arranged than the previous Smiths albums. "Death Of A Disco Dancer" and "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me", for instance, are unthinkable in John Porter or early-Marr/Street incarnations. In short, I don't think "Strangeways" represents a 'suburbanized' version of the old Smiths ghetto-- it's a new neighborhood altogether, for better and for worse.

 

[Novice]

Too lazy to read the whole thread but...

I recall reading mostly positive reviews of this album in the past, in anthologies of rock criticism, for example. Writers who are generally hostile to Morrissey and the Smiths, who find the discographies of both repetitive or emotionally callow, have I believe tended to think very well of this album.

It has a detached sound about it that I think Morrissey fans can't make head or tail of, sometimes. They want to think of Morrissey as "passionate," which I think is to some extent a confusion of the atmosphere of his live shows with that of his recordings. I think there has always been a great difference between the two.

Kill Uncle has what I consider to be his most perfect song, as well as some his most unusual songs. It also has a few of his flattest duds, but these are not worse listening for me than his more lively duds (see his most recent album for a fine selection of these).

It's basically a less rock remake of Strangeways. Nix the moronic "one knee" pun, and I give it a B+ or even an A-.

 

[Anaesthesine]

There are vast swathes of recorded music that I love listening to that were recorded in the 60s, 70s...even the 1980s! Productions that sound far warmer and more 'real' and alive than most material I hear in these dull digital days. And I just wonder why The Smiths never sounded as good as that music. I think finance was probably a bigger factor than we'd like to think, but I do believe that it was at least in part an artistic and aesthetic decision. Them were rotten days in the 80s. It was a binary age. You had to take a stand on one side or the other, on everything, from Free Market Capitalism to Fairlight synthesizers. And part of The Smiths kitchen sink, anti-glamour aesthetic was their cheap as chips, MW radio sound. In opposition to yer Bob Clearmountain/Mutt Lange/Trevor Horn type sounds. As was the way with The Smiths this ended up actually becoming glamourous! But one quarter century on, it doesn't work.
But I can listen to Beatles, Bowie, Can, Roxy, Blondie, etc, from a half century ago and it sounds fresher than ever.
Yes, clearly, great songs iz great songs. And a great song was never made shit by bad production, but.....I'm never 'appy!
Aaah, if only they could have sounded as good as 'The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye'........

Well put.

I agree with you, Joe. Production does matter. I've wasted a decent amount of my life in recording studios, and I've seen analog production methods morph into pure digital soundscaping and then morph back into a digital approximation of analog (which is nothing short of perverse). Production makes the difference between a great song and a washed-out, incoherent mess. It cannot make crap music anything other than well-produced crap, but it can cheapen and degrade great work.

Modern digital production methods are sharp, crisp, precise, shallow and often lifeless. They can easily suck much of the emotion and character out of a great song, and a great band can be hobbled by a flat, uninteresting sound. As was (endlessly) argued in another thread, much of what is wrong with music today comes down to the fact that our musical tastes have been digitally remastered and flat-lined. Cleanliness is the death of urgency.

As everyone knows, the first Smiths album was gutted by appalling production, and I think it was their best, most urgent work. As for the rest of their catalog, I think it still sounds pretty damn good. I'd also like to know whether their low-fi approach was mostly a matter of aesthetics, or a matter of a lack of capital, and I wonder who made the call. J. Marr seems like the kind of person who knows his way around a studio. Morrissey strikes me as a bit of a technophobe when it comes to the twiddling of the knobs.

Kill Uncle was murdered by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who drowned it in a bowl of porridge. We're all lucky that none of The Smiths stuff got that kind of treatment.

Don't be a fetishist of technology, joe. I agree the production is better on the recent stuff but great songs iz great songs. All of us would have to throw out 3/4 of our record collections (or 'drag them into the trash' for you younger kids) if we judged them on the basis of crisp production. So I counter your theory with one of my own: we're all obsessed with 'sound quality' because we desperately want to reassure ourselves that digital technology represents a new golden age in which machines have helped music and not killed it.

As an aside, I've been loving the first Dead Weather album (Horehound), and I think it's mostly because the production is so dead-on fantastic; it pleases my 80s ears no end. The drums sound like actual drums in an actual room, the guitars are dirty, the vocals are raw, and the overall sound has an immediacy and a vibrancy that is sadly lacking in much other music these days. I think a big part of Jack White's appeal lies in his ear for production. He is not the world's greatest songwriter, but damn, he knows what kick-ass music should sound like when it pours out of a speaker (or an earbud) and into your ears.

Audiophiles are obsessed with sound quality because they are hopeless geeks. The rest of us who worship at the alter of music should care very much about what goes on behind closed doors, when a band is often left to the not-so-tender mercies of an unimaginative producer and his software.

 

[Girl-with-the-Thorn]

Nevertheless, may I suggest one mitigating factor? Thank you. "Strangeways" has a different production quality to it, but the songs themselves were differently arranged than the previous Smiths albums. "Death Of A Disco Dancer" and "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me", for instance, are unthinkable in John Porter or early-Marr/Street incarnations. In short, I don't think "Strangeways" represents a 'suburbanized' version of the old Smiths ghetto-- it's a new neighborhood altogether, for better and for worse.

We are in agreement here. I do believe that there was an artistic aim in making the production of Smiths albums- especially in the early years- what it was, and while Morrissey has confessed to being a "non-musician", he probably did have an active opinion about this.

Going back to the original topic for a moment: despite being something of a dum-dum when it comes to the technicalities of music, the production is one of the only things that truly bugs me about Kill Uncle. Anaesthesine's description of it being "drowned in a bowl of porridge" is pretty much on the mark for me, and I honestly think that it would be more generally appreciated if it had been more carefully and appropriately produced.

 

[Worm]

The reason "Kill Uncle" sucks is very simple. It repeats what happened with "Hatful of Hollow": the radio sessions and live versions were obviously better than the stuff they put on the album. I gave "Kill Uncle" many, many listens before the 1991 tour and very few after. The reason? The live versions were almost night-and-day superior. And it wasn't just production. The songs-- even the "messier" arrangements, as with "Sing Your Life"-- had an energy the studio versions lacked. My God, even "King Leer" sounded fantastic.

What would be interesting is to compare reactions to "Kill Uncle" before and after his 1991 tour. There's no way to do that, unfortunately.

 

[Novice]

The most godawfully produced Morrissey album is surely the vaunted Your Arsenal. I don't care if a Spider From Mars was at the boards. It sounds like a justly forgotten SST release.

 

[Worm]

Going back to the original topic for a moment: despite being something of a dum-dum when it comes to the technicalities of music, the production is one of the only things that truly bugs me about Kill Uncle. Anaesthesine's description of it being "drowned in a bowl of porridge" is pretty much on the mark for me, and I honestly think that it would be more generally appreciated if it had been more carefully and appropriately produced.

The production didn't matter. Most of the music arrangements were crap to begin with, and Morrissey writing in a "light" style (as I think Gavin Hopps explained) only made matters worse. The album came off as both hasty and overwrought at the same time, in other words, tentative and directionless. "Kill Uncle" is Morrissey's "wilderness" album. He found his footing in spring 1991, beginning with his return to live performances, and he never looked back.

 

[Girl-with-the-Thorn]

The production didn't matter. Most of the music arrangements were crap to begin with, and Morrissey writing in a "light" style (as I think Gavin Hopps explained) only made matters worse. The album came off as both hasty and overwrought at the same time, in other words, tentative and directionless. "Kill Uncle" is Morrissey's "wilderness" album. He found his footing in spring 1991, beginning with his return to live performances, and he never looked back.

Really? Granted, the first half of the album is rather light (with the exception of 'Asian Rut'), but the second half has always struck me as quite dark and contemplative. I think that's actually why I like it- it's an album of extremes, or as I think littlebird put it earlier in the thread, "swinging between Carry On Morrissey and 'We're all going to die!' Morrissey". Musically it isn't a favourite of mine either, and for me it certainly doesn't compare with YA, YOR, ROTT etc, but overall I like it. Each to their own I guess.

 

[Worm]

Really? Granted, the first half of the album is rather light (with the exception of 'Asian Rut'), but the second half has always struck me as quite dark and contemplative. I think that's actually why I like it- it's an album of extremes, or as I think someone else put it earlier in the thread, "swinging between Carry On Morrissey and 'We're all going to die!' Morrissey". Musically it isn't a favourite of mine either. Each to their own I guess.

It's dark and contemplative, sure, but not in a compelling way because the music...well, the music sucks, I'm sorry to say. Call it production, call it the songwriting. Whatever. It's one miserable cringing flea-bitten dog after another, except for "There's A Place In Hell"-- which, as I said, is a nice little piano number that complements the "lighter" mode of Morrissey's lyrics. (I'm not counting "Tony The Pony".)

Now that you mention it, I would say that side one of "Kill Uncle" is pretty good. I'd say these five tracks would be just about the best side of any Morrissey album:

"Our Frank" (As is)
"Sing Your Life" (KROQ Version)
"Mute Witness" (Tour version recorded in a studio...though mmmmmmaybe as is)
"King Leer" (Tour version recorded in a studio with stand-up bass)
"The Loop" (As is)

 

[blue jag]

Have to say its probably my least favourite.

 

[Girl-with-the-Thorn]

Now that you mention it, I would say that side one of "Kill Uncle" is pretty good. I'd say these five tracks would be just about the best side of any Morrissey album:

"Our Frank" (As is)
"Sing Your Life" (KROQ Version)
"Mute Witness" (Tour version recorded in a studio...though mmmmmmaybe as is)
"King Leer" (Tour version recorded in a studio with stand-up bass)
"The Loop" (As is)

True, that would be a very strong first side. 'The Loop' would have added a bit more energy to the album too.

 

[Worm]

True, that would be a very strong first side. 'The Loop' would have added a bit more energy to the album too.

Yes, and precisely because of its murky, early-Smiths-like production qualities.

*loops thread again*

 

[Worm]

My re-issued, re-packaged "Kill Uncle":

A
"Our Frank" (As is)
"Sing Your Life" (KROQ Version)
"Mute Witness" (Tour version recorded in a studio...though mmmmmmaybe as is)
"King Leer" (Tour version recorded in a studio with stand-up bass)
"The Loop" (As is)

AA
"My Love Life" (KROQ Version)
"Tony The Pony"
"That's Entertainment"
"Driving Your Girlfriend Home" (Massive Attack Remix)
"There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends" (As is)

 

[Girl-with-the-Thorn]

My re-issued, re-packaged "Kill Uncle":

A
"Our Frank" (As is)
"Sing Your Life" (KROQ Version)
"Mute Witness" (Tour version recorded in a studio...though mmmmmmaybe as is)
"King Leer" (Tour version recorded in a studio with stand-up bass)
"The Loop" (As is)

AA
"My Love Life" (KROQ Version)
"Tony The Pony"
"That's Entertainment"
"Driving Your Girlfriend Home" (Massive Attack Remix)
"There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends" (As is)

That would be an amazing reissue. Although I would have snuck either 'Harsh Truth...' or 'Asian Rut' in there somewhere too.

 

[Qvist]

I'm with you to an extent. It does sound a little too sterile and vacant in places. This is precisely why "Rank" became my favorite Smiths album after about, oh, 1996 or 1997. There's a "living" sound of The Smiths which the ear starts to pick out. (Yes, I have only one ear.)

Nevertheless, may I suggest one mitigating factor? Thank you. "Strangeways" has a different production quality to it, but the songs themselves were differently arranged than the previous Smiths albums. "Death Of A Disco Dancer" and "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me", for instance, are unthinkable in John Porter or early-Marr/Street incarnations. In short, I don't think "Strangeways" represents a 'suburbanized' version of the old Smiths ghetto-- it's a new neighborhood altogether, for better and for worse.

You're right, that is a better description, though in any case my problem is the lack of dynamics. "Last night" maybe might have worked in earlier contexts too, if they'd stripped off the strings - that actually has one of the more discernible and intricate guitar melodies on the album, but it's drenched under the orchestral layer and the rhytm section is hardly present. But you could imagine it in a "Vicar in a Tutu"-sort of guise.

I've never really hit it off with Rank, for some reason (except for the glorious intro to "Still Ill"), but I don't have it on CD and haven't listened to it for years. Maybe that'll be the next frontier as I run out of Morrissey, as I am very close to doing.

cheers

 

[Anonymous1]

My re-issued, re-packaged "Kill Uncle":

A
"Our Frank" (As is)
"Sing Your Life" (KROQ Version)
"Mute Witness" (Tour version recorded in a studio...though mmmmmmaybe as is)
"King Leer" (Tour version recorded in a studio with stand-up bass)
"The Loop" (As is)

AA
"My Love Life" (KROQ Version)
"Tony The Pony"
"That's Entertainment"
"Driving Your Girlfriend Home" (Massive Attack Remix)
"There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends" (As is)

Morrissey probably shouldn't have cover songs on his main albums, even though 'That's Entertainment' would indeed be a strong addition. I think 'Pregnant For The Last Time' would essentially do the same job.