Day 5 - The Queen is Dead by The Smiths

Day 5 of 10: My all time favorite albums that are STILL in rotation. And that's the key, really. And that's why this one is a no brainer. It's 1986's "The Queen is Dead" by The Smiths... perfect then... and perfect today. John Cari and Darius Gambino I look forward to your next choices. Was there some sort of wedding in London this morning or something?

(Originally posted on May 19)

Updated July 25

The Queen is Dead deserves far more than a quick Facebook post on the day of the Royal Wedding. After all, The Smiths are perhaps the singular band of the 1980s, their influence felt -- and heard -- in the three decades (!) that followed. Johnny Marr is still making compelling music; unfortunately the same can't always be said about Morrissey. In any event, 1986's The Queen is Dead marked the band's high-water mark.

Side 1 kicks off with the title track, which begins with a head fake -- the World War I era music hall singalong  "Take Me to Dear Old Blighty". It lasts all of seventeen seconds, just long enough to hold your interest before being blown away by Mike Joyce's driving drumbeat of the "The Queen is Dead", the most rocking song in the Smiths' catalog. For six minutes, those drums Marr's guitars are over the top with while Morrissey takes aim on the Royal Family and all the things he finds tiring about Britain.

"Frankly Mr Shankly", the album's second real track is vintage Smiths: A bouncy Marr bouncy guitar riff providing a counterpoint to Morrissey's snarky lyrics. The song is an assault on poseurs everywhere, and - as expected - Morrissey pulls no punches: "Frankly Mr Shankly since you ask/You are a flatulent pain in the ass" and "I didn't realize you wrote poetry/I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry". The song also amplfies Morrissey's worldview, especially in lines like "I'd rather be famous than righteous or holy any day, any day, any day".

"I Know It's Over" starts dark and quiet -- with Morrissey crooning "Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head" and lamenting about sleeping alone, not even finishing the thought: "And as I climb into an empty bed/Oh well, enough said." As the song progresses, the music swells but the lyrics don't get any brighter. In my mind, "I Know It's Over" is kind of a companion piece to the next track "Had No One Ever", something of a dirge about the despair of being alone. Luckily, the guitar work from Marr keeps this one from getting too bogged down.

Things cheer up immensely on the misspelled "Cemetry Gates", the final song on the side. To Morrissey, it may be a "dreaded sunny day", but he manages to skewer plagiarists while among the gravestones of his favorite poets: "Keats and Yeats are your side/While Wilde is on mind".

Side 2 starts with one of the band's funniest songs, "Bigmouth Strikes Again". Morrissey defends his acerbic wit with fabulous lines like  "Sweetness I was only joking when I said/You shouldn't be bludgeoned in your bed".

"The Boy With the Thorn in His Side" was initially a single released nearly a year before the album and it was included here because it's just that good, while the rockabilly inspired "Vicar in a Tutu" feels like a throw-in amid the strength of the album's other tracks,

But it all comes full circle on what may be the Smiths' finest song. "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" is an homage to a songwriting duo that - against all odds - became one of the greatest of all time. Morrissey sounds his most human and vulnerable singing sublime lines like "And if a double decker bus crashes into us/To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die" while Marr's arrangement of overdubbed guitars and strings is a thing of absolute beauty,

The album could have ended there, but there's room for one more. "Some Girls are Bigger than Others" again showcases the intricate riffs that made Marr the greatest guitarist of his generation... and the volume drop in the song's first measures is deliberate.

The Smiths would spectacularly disband just a year and a half later, and while Morrissey went on to a successful solo career and Marr played with everyone from The Pretenders to Modest Mouse to The Cribs before launching a solo career of his own, there is very little hope that these two larger-than-life figures will ever decide to share a stage or recording studio again. But the five years they spent together yielded a catalog of songs that most artists wouldn't be able to match if given decades.