You Are The Quarry
Morrissey

There's something oxymoronic about old misery guts Morrissey living in sunny, plam-treed California, it's like finding out David Lee Roth is living on cold soup in a bedsit in Manchester, but that's where he's been calling home for the seven years since his last album. Seven years is an awful long time in pop music years and a nation of lovelorn young men turned their lonely eyes to "You Are The Quarry" in breathless anticipation, but the truth is that it's "merely" quite good – sometimes great, sometimes a bit rubbish, and sometimes really annoying. It's a pity he chose to open with a clunker like "America Is Not The World," you expect better from Morrissey than the staggering insight that Americans are rather fat and Europeans don't like them much – really? well I never! Thankfully after that lumbering start comes the terrific punky rush of the single "Irish Blood, English Heart" and then "I Have Forgiven Jesus" which is the sort of wonderfully melodramatic sob story that made us all want to make him a nice cup of tea when he first emerged with The Smiths. Morrissey has never sounded better vocally, full of vim and vigour, but he's really dragged down by some crushingly ordinary production that has about as much spark as a wet book of matches. Never mind Johnny Marr and his magic guitar, I would have happily settled for the flash glamabilly Mick Ronson brought to "Your Arsenal" – terrific songs like "Come Back To Camden" and "First Of The Gang To Die" deserve better than these ho-hum rock stylings. The real problem with the album though is that Morrissey seems to have left his sense of humour in his other suit. He's always been full of egocentric piss and vinegar but his rapier lyrical wit made it a real pleasure to swallow, now he just sounds like a self-absorbed prick who's spent the past seven years stewing in his juices and nursing old grudges. "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" shows he hasn't lost his knack for titles of brilliantly Wildean flair, but the song itself (along with "You Know I Couldn't Last" and "How Can Anyone Possibly Know How I Feel?") is a humourless tirade against all the unworthy peasants – rock critics, judges, former band members, modern pop stars – who he thinks aren't fit to breathe the same oxygen as His Wonderfulness. It sounds like his long exile in California has turned him into Norma Desmond, a paranoid old queen all alone in some ghostly LA mansion defiantly declaring to the world "I AM big, it's the music that got small!" Nice to have you back Morrissey, but get over yourself.

Stargazing
Alpha

Of all the moody comedown music that came out during trip-hop's fifteen minutes of fame in the 1990s, Alpha's debut "Come From Heaven" still stands as the most heart-breakingly gorgeous of the lot, it's groggy torch songs the perfect soundtrack to sticking your head in a gas oven after a doomed love affair (rather appropriate for an album that sampled Sylvia Plath's voice). Unfortunately the follow-up "The Impossible Thrill" was a huge letdown which drowned some feeble tunes in a baroque tsunami of fussy arrangements and I thought my romance with Alpha would turn out to be just a brief fling (though we'd always have Paris). But oh me of little faith, with "Stargazing" they've gotten their groove back and made their best album yet. Though it sounds a lot like "Come From Heaven: Part Deux" full of pillow-soft ballads and sample-happy instrumentals dressed up in strings and twinkling electronics, it's often more dreampop than trip-hop with Alpha drifting deeper into a 21st century version of classic 1960s easy listening pop influenced by the gods of the genre like Jimmy Webb and John Barry. They still drape sheets of gauzy atmospherics over everything but the arrangements and tunes are tighter, resulting in a retro-futuristic MOR sound that's like the Witchita Lineman floating in outer space with Major Tom. Having four lead singers might seem a bit greedy but the contrast between the pretty voices of Helen White and Wendy Stubbs and the angst-ridden croons of Martin Barnard and Jason Swaybe adds a variety of colors to the album — well, different shades of blue at least — from the dreamy fairylights pop of "Once Around Town" to the dark basement soul of "Lipstick From The Asylum." Few bands make heartache sound like such a heavenly state of being, as blissfully narcotic as being woozily out of your head on cough medicine, and this is the most addictive they've ever sounded. Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree. [Official site]

From Gardens Where
We Feel Secure
Virginia Astley

Every country has it's own particular idea of utopia, in America it's a cozy Norman Rockwellian vision of jus' plain folks in friendly small towns with white picket fences. For the English it's a picture postcard village in the countryside on a perfect summer's day where the bells of an old stone church ring out over sun-dappled green fields, rosy-cheeked children fly kites, willow tress hang lazily over glistening streams, and the gentle "thwock!" of leather on willow can be heard from a cricket game on the village green. Capturing this Arcadian idyll is like trying to catch a butterfly in a net but cult eccentric Virgina Astley had a go on this recently re-released minor classic from 1983 which she described as "a soundtrack to a summer day." Made up of nine gently pastoral ambient instrumentals that mix piano and flute refrains with recordings of chirping birds, church bells, the creak of a garden gate, the baa-ing of lambs and the hooting of owls, each track is like a little Impressionist sketch that floats through the lazy, hazy air like dandelion spores. Imagine Erik Satie playing piano in someone's back garden while Vaughan Williams waters the roses — go on, I know you can — or a Brian Eno ambient album called "Music For Village Greens" and you get the idea. If it all sounds as precious as little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, well, it is a bit, but behind the lacy prettiness is a wistful yearning for a world that doesn't exist any more (it certainly didn't in 1983) which actually makes it quite moving at times — yes, even on a perfect summer day the English can find something to be depressed about. If this England exists today it's only in the heads of Anglophile Americans who watch too much Masterpiece Theatre. It may only be wallpaper music (very classy Laura Ashley wallpaper though) but this has an eerie Proustian effect on me which is strange because I grew up on a council estate in London to a soundtrack of traffic, barking dogs and tin cans being kicked down the street. [Official site]

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