The songs of The Smiths are beautifully orchestrated. The music is uncommonly crisp and keen and acute. Listening to The Smiths is like the heightened sense of lucidity after a bout of illness. Your senses, temporarily dulled by infection, compensate by temporarily working overtime. You feel light-headed. Everything is ultra-bright, super-saturated and high-contrast.
Of course the highest contrast of all is that between the music and the lyrics. Lyrical dissonance was not a creative device for The Smiths, it was a strategy.
(…)
How Soon Is Now is an exception to the dissonant rule. It is a portentous song and its lyrics and orchestration are perfectly aligned, pushing and pulling in the same ominous direction.
(…)
I like to think that the opening lines of How Soon Is Now are a joke at our expense. We are meant to hear “I am the sun and the air”. I am elemental. I am a force of nature. Morrissey over-compensating for his wallflower tendencies with bombast. He knew he would be pulling most people’s plonkers. I’m not ashamed to say that he had me for a while.
“I am the son
“And the heir…”
