Pasolini is me, Accattone you'll be

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

09/04/06 : Ringleader Of The Tormentors - Morrissey

Ah - Steven Patrick Morrissey.  What are we going to do with you?  At least back in the heady days of 2006, he was only merely problematic (although questions had been asked about his general character since the early 90s) and most people were happy to let the music do the talking for him.  I seem to recall liking this, but I've not revisited it in years (as is the case for all of his solo albums).

And yeah, there's a nice full sound to it - it's lush!  "You Have Killed Me" is a fine track, but all of the first half are pretty decent efforts.  However, either the album is front loaded with the quality tracks or his voice just gets a bit tiresome because I did find it was getting to be a bit of a drag towards the end.  But if you're going to make one half better than the other, it makes sense to go for the first half and then you can just turn it off when you get bored.  Also, this is another album we (and this was definitely me) owned, taking us to nine for the year - just one more to make double figures!

We're at #1 with a new entry this week starting an eleven week run - this and "You Are The Quarry", his previous album, marked a bit of a mini-revival for the lad (and they were definitely a step up in quality for me from his previous albums).  The rest of the top five were Massive Attack, P!nk (another new entry), Embrace and The Kooks and we have another new entry in the top ten with The Flaming Lips (#6) - At War With The Mystics, which definitely traded on the glories of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album but it does surprise me by telling me that it was produced by Tony Visconti - he feels like the sort of person that Morrissey would despise (although, let's face it, that's most people).  The critics mostly liked it, but one did make the weird comment "it's easy to enjoy Ringleader of the Tormentors as merely an everyday Morrissey record, but it's hard not to shake the suspicion that this album is the closest he's ever been to forgettable".  

"Customers also listened to" Johnny Marr and The Smiths - no surprises there.  And, somewhat more surprisingly, Mexrrissey - which is (obviously) Morrissey done in a Mexican stylee.  And, even more surprisingly, it works a lot better than you'd imagine.  Back to these less sunny shores, what you think of Morrissey is no longer just a case of the music - but taken on the music alone this is a pretty decent album (at least for the first half).

02/04/06 - A nice reminder of a momentous week
16/04/06 - A mystifyingly popular album