I think "Your Arsenal" is the best solo album. It is a strong, almost flawless collection of songs. "You're The One For Me, Fatty" might've been chopped or replaced-- "Jack The Ripper", a B-side after the album came out, would have worked better to end Side 1 with "Certain People" starting Side 2. Otherwise it's excellent.
I think it has something the others don't, which is a defiant, all-conquering attitude akin-- in spirit-- to the run of singles The Smiths had from "Panic" to "Sheila Take A Bow". In sound, I think this album (really starting in the 1991 "Kill Uncle" tour) is the one that breaks definitively from The Smiths, not "Vauxhall". Mick Ronson is Morrissey's best producer, hands down. Every other album, "Vauxhall" included, sounds as if the producers are elevating mediocre guitar tracks into fully-formed songs. "Your Arsenal" would sound great as a collection of demos. I don't think that's true of any other album. Maybe "Quarry".
"Glamorous Glue", "We'll Let You Know", "National Front Disco", and "Seasick, Yet Still Docked" are among his most interesting lyrics. "We Hate It" and "Certain People I Know" are among the funniest and most whimsical. "Tomorrow" is just a great pop tune. "Fatty" as I said I can do without but I can just about tap my foot to it. And "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side" and "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" are unusual Morrissey songs in that they're both somewhat optimistic and outward-looking. The album is the sound of Morrissey flexing his muscles, angry and disillusioned as ever, but up to the challenge of spitting in the world's eye.
The smartest, most nuanced, most sophisticated, and easily the most quotable is "Viva Hate". I think Qvist is right to say it's too quasi-Smithsy, so you almost have to disqualify it from the top spot on those grounds. Then again, Vini Reilly is the best guitarist Morrissey has worked with (second to Ronson if you count him) since Johnny Marr. He's probably the only guitarist who was an artist in his own right and not a hired gun. And maybe before we call the Stephen Street stuff a "weaker version" of The Smiths we should note that he practically was a member of The Smiths. Not such a bad thing to listen to it as the fifth Smiths album, is it?
I share the love for "Vauxhall and I" but in my opinion the album is hobbled by a couple of less than stellar tracks ("Spring-Heeled Jim", "Hold On To Your Friends", "Lifeguard Sleeping"), the aforementioned murky production, and, finally and most off-puttingly, it's the first appearance of a newer, deeper strain of Morrissey's pop star martyr complex. Sure, it was always there, but never so pervasively in an album and never so humorless. Didn't ruin the album by any stretch, but it was a sign of things to come. Bitter, isolated, misanthropic Morrissey wasn't far away.
And once again, looking at his career after "Vauxhall", we're left to wonder just how badly the court case damaged him. The man who wrote "Sorrow Will Come In The End" was not the artist who wrote the haunting "Little Man, What Now?" Can you imagine "Little Man, What Now?" written in 1997 or 2004?
Mid-afternoon nostalgia television show
The pigs in their suits hacked away at you
Dragged your face in shit
Friday nights, 1969
Disemboweled and forgotten
Left for dead
One day the whores will get me too
Etc.