MUSIC

...Best

The Smiths

At first glance, "...Best," The Smiths' new compilation double album, seems like a simple random reshuffling of a handful of tracks from "Louder than Bombs," the bands earlier greatest hits package. But take a closer look, because "...Best" is in fact a more than fair representation of the group's music.

This collection makes an almost self-conscious effort to show off the dichotomy between cynicism and flippancy that characterizes The Smiths. While the first album concentrates on the brittle verbal mockery of songs like "Shoplifters of the World Unite" and "Some Girls are Bigger than Others," the second album evokes far more of The Smiths' more morose side, with "bruises bigger than dinner plates," "young bones" and sado-masochistic love.

Which makes the listener wonder why they have included the relatively flimsy "Girl Afraid" in the second album. The song's stock theme of boy-girl misunderstandings detracts from the mood of raw bleakness induced by songs like "The Headmaster Ritual" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now." Furthermore, the song shifts the album's focus sharply away from the peculiarities of Morissey's self absorbed first person to random generality in a disconcerting fashion.

"...Best I" is a very coherent and well-chosen collection; the selected songs merge together and support each other very well. The album starts with the warbling navel-gazing of "This Charming Man" and then spirals upwards into increasingly light-headed images of crumbling self-control and bitter amusement.

Nevertheless, the second album, "...Best II," presents a clearer picture of The Smiths as we know them. The lyrics here crystallize the sense of delicate world-weariness: for example, Morrissey sings of life and death, "and neither one particularly appeals to me."

The trademark elliptical phrases are also far more in evidence on this album, with oblique allusions in such lines as "Caligula would have blushed" ("Heaven Knows") and "I know how Joan of Arc felt as the flames rose to her roman nose and her Walkman started to melt ("Bigmouth Strikes Again)."

This collection as a whole shows The Smiths at their most deliberately Anglicized. It is not only the Merseyside accent (which is perceptibly stronger when Morrissey declares lightly: "I'd like to drop my trousers to the Queen,") or the Wodehouse-like phrases ("you're the bee's knees"), but also the sly double meanings which continually poke fun at British culture. "Two lumps, please," Morrissey declares soulfully, in "Reel Around the Fountain," referring to a cup of tea and a sexual partner at the same time.

The attraction of the rather self-pitying lyrics may begin to pall after a while. It is sometimes difficult to take Morrissey's appealingly depressed schoolboy voice very seriously, even when he is uttering outrageously repulsive sentiments like: "...by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed."

In a purely musical sense, however, the collection is agreeably varied. Sometimes, the melodies are in violent contrast to the lyrics. The light, jangly movement of "The Boy with the Thorn in his Side" makes lines like "behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire for love" stand out in stark relief. On the other hand, "Ask," with its simple little message that "shyness" and "coyness" inhibit love, is reinforced by the bouncy (dare I say it?) hopefulness of Johnny Marr's versatile guitar.

Although Smiths' fans will have heard all of these songs before in other places, "...Best" organizes these familiar tunes in an intriguing new way, giving us a fresh perspective on Britain's masters of humor-tinged angst.