It's funny you should pick that one, Paul
I'd just been reading my Dad's review of the same album from A Music Paper Round-Up of 1987 on a Smiths website.
I've C&P'd it below for your viewing pleasure:
SMITHS "Strangeways, Here We Come"
It was typically perverse of the Smiths to end it all with such an oblique and unspectacular farewell. They'd made their mark and their fortunes with a succession of outrageously incisive and drily hilarious tilts at the windmills of the conventional mind, and yet their final album was an essentially subdued and flawed creation which sold itself solely on the basic textures of Morrissey's talent and reputation.
"A Rush And A Push", for example, is vaguely splendid but says nothing. I'd hoped for more from the first song to refer explicitly to the Mother's Boy's mysterious father. Similarly "Unhappy Birthday" and "Dead At One's Elbow" are saddening and hollow rewrites of standard Smiths fare. Yet once you get used to the inferior quality of these songs and learn to read between their lines, "Strangeways" becomes the ultimate Smiths album - in more ways than one.
In "Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loved Me", Morrissey concedes that "This story is old ... but it goes on", and this perhaps is the key to an utterly unhappy record.
Though "Death Of A Disco Dancer" is remorsely cynical and enthralling, it's also overwhelmingly depressing, something no-one but a moron or a student with a death wish could've read into the group's past works. And while "Dancer", "Girlfriend", "Stop Me" and "Paint A Vulgar Picture" are songs enough to make "Strangeways" an essential purchase, the final mass "I Won't Share You" hangs over the album and the band like a shroud.
A wholly depressng picture of a band on the brink of the void, with no chance of getting their tongue into anyone's cheek, "Strangeways, Here We Come" is not a record to enjoy, but it's one you must experience. Because, intentionally or not, it reads like a suicide note and explains just why it all had to stop.
Pretentious, mon papa? Mais oui.
