E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Much has been said of Crybaby , and all of it is generally obvious, as will be my brief remarks here, no doubt.  The band, comprised of one bearded, bespectacled, balding Bristol-based singer-songwriter, is not seemingly a very promising proposition - the world hardly needs any more hairy singers.  What makes this eponymous album so brilliant, even wonderful (and endlessly rewarding on replay) is how it manages to convey several vital strands of music history to the present, despite and because of its evident elements of pastiche and homage. Crybaby is an album of 10 slow, and mid-tempo songs - torch-songs, mostly, crooned with precisely the same passionate intensity, glottal warble, and leapfrog inflection as Morrissey - indeed, this is a missing Smiths album, if The Smiths had used more piano, organ and reverb.  Crybaby is as flamboyant and heroic as Gene Pitney , as Orbison - it swoons with heartache, wearing sorrow like its panache.  The lyrics ...

About 25 years ago, on June 16, 1986, the third album from The Smiths - the greatest British band of the 1980s ( Pixies are the American equivalent) - was released in England.  It was called The Queen Is Dead .  And it is without doubt (still, evermore) one of the finest popular music albums ever released.  The thrumming, drumming insistence of the first (title) track is deliriously potent, with its great lament: "life is very long when you're lonely".  'Frankly, Mr. Shankly' is still the best monologue of a mediocre talent put to music, and is Morrissey 's riposte to Larkin 's 'Mr. Bleaney'; and ends with the wonderful "give us money."  In the middle, come two of the great Smith moments - 'Cemetery Gates' (" Wilde is on my mine") - which I loved - and then the extraordinarily weird 'Bigmouth Strikes Again" ("sweetness I was only joking when I said/ by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed"), ...

Simon Armitage is one of the better-known English poets of the last quarter-century: he is published by Faber, his poems are studied by students across the land, and he regularly appears on the BBC and in print; he's also a sometime-journalist, rock musician, and novelist.  If not exactly the Dylan Thomas or WH Auden of his generation, until Don Paterson , his unchecked rise made him the most-talked of and admired young poet of his time.  He was, in short, short-listed for the recently-vacant post of Poet Laureate, one his friend Carol Ann Duffy eventually came to occupy. In today's Guardian magazine , Armitage has an interview with Morrissey , onetime-frontman of T he Smiths , with Pixies , the most important and intelligent indie band of the 1980s.  Morrissey is the closest thing Britain has to Oscar Wilde in these dumbed-down times ( Stephen Fry is an impostor) - and has something of the aphoristic caustic wit of Larkin' s little-Englandism.  In short, h...

Perhaps England's greatest living lyric genius, comparable, in his strange ways, to Bob Dylan , but far more contemporary, is Morrissey , of The Smiths , who were the greatest band of the 1980s, anywhere. Like millions of my generation, I loved him - and still love his songs. It therefore comes as something of a major disappointment to read that the man allegedly believes England has been "flooded" by immigrants , and that the UK's multicultural dynamism has swept away a whole way of "English" life. Move over, Larkin (another great miserabilist), is there still room in Little England for another grumpy old fart? What is is with the British? All their best male wits are essentially conservatives, at least traditionalists - including the irascible Mr. Fry , who thinks modern poetry is mainly rubbish. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear of a male British genius wildly open to the new, the exotic and the foreign? Then again, if the songsmith has been misquoted...

The year 2007 presents several satisfying options for anniversaries. 25 years since The Smiths were formed (1982) or, more gloomily, 20 since they broke up (1987). The Smiths, in the opinion of Eyewear , are one of the two most significant British bands of the last quarter century or so (the other is Joy Division , whose uncanny dark sublimity is inexplicable in a popular, albeit alternative, music context). Radiohead, Oasis , Coldplay , Arctic Monkeys - whatever - they ain't The Beatles , they ain't The Smiths. Strangeways, Here We Come , their fourth and final studio album, charted in the US of A at #55. So it comes as something of a welcome surprise that, recently, one half of the duo that defined Smithean genius, Johnny Marr , joined an alternative American band, Modest Mouse (pictured) - and then went on to have, with his new group, the US #1 album. Is this album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank , worthy of such heights? Is it a curiosity, coasting on Marr's...

Eyewear is getting old - or maybe it's living outside North America. Having never seen Garden State , an indie Gen Y film from the 00s, I missed the scene where Natalie Portman's character infamously (at least in almost every review I've read of the band) recommends The Shins , saying "they'll change your life". Until today, my life had only been changed by 9/11, the war in Iraq, marriage, leaving Paris for London, and the death of my father and several other family members and loved ones (death didn't just visit Arcade Fire in a press release, it is real and outlines us with light and dark) since 2000 rolled us into a new world order. But the state of my garden has been at least slightly enappled, with Wincing The Night Away , the third album from the band with the name like The Smiths . The Shins, friends, sound a little like The Smiths, when not sounding like The La's . Or for that matter The Red House Painters (hear "Summer Dress") or...