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Sooner or later, our favorite artists inevitably disappoint us. No one can create masterpieces every time, and when your career goes on for twenty years or more, the chances of falling into a rut and/or just getting lazy because you're so insulated by your stardom and the adoration of insanely devoted, unquestioning fans that you stop viewing your work objectively increase sharply. Morrissey's been around long enough that his career has gone through several peaks and valleys, but since his last two albums were among the strongest of his entire career, I was optimistic about Years Of Refusal despite its unspeakably hideous cover art, easily the worst album cover by a major artist in at least a decade. Unfortunately, that cover is a reflection of the music within: a frequently confused, occasionally brilliant but mostly mediocre record that shares much more with 1997's bland Maladjusted than it does with his recent triumphs.

The music itself is entirely competent. By this point, Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer have become accustomed to their employer's sonic preferences, and more recent addition Jesse Tobias has clearly learned well from them. So the instrumental tracks backing Moz on Years Of Refusal are full of the same sort of dramatic, moderately aggressive guitars, eerie keyboards, and flamboyant eccentricities (the inexplicable flamenco influence on "When Last I Spoke To Carol" being the most obvious) as usual. Of course, this also means that much of the album sounds extremely familiar, despite the band's tendency to throw in the occasional nod to experimentalism, as with the feedback-drone coda to "You Were Good In Your Time". If you've heard the two new songs from Greatest Hits-- and they're both included here, a cheap move since that gives the album a mere 10 new songs and he's obviously saving unreleased material for the B-sides-- you pretty much know what to expect already.

And perhaps it's this musical complacency that also accounts for Moz's undeniable lyrical laziness on this album. The last time this happened was on Maladjusted's excruciating "Papa Jack"; now imagine an entire album where almost every song is the same sort of tired batch of clichés. I say "almost" because there are a couple of glaring exceptions: the wonderful first single, "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris", where Moz finally finds a new way to express his traditional theme of loneliness by imagining the City of Lights as his lover, and "Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed", which admittedly descends into romanticist sentimentality by its end but also contains the album's most unadornedly beautiful, simple lines: "Life is nothing much to lose/It's just so lonely here without you". (There's also more of a sardonic edge to "All You Need Is Me", but it's hard for me to count it because I've heard it too damn many times already.)

But the rest of the songs are a mess. Morrissey drags back up lyrical gambits he's used successfully before-- the physical-handicap-as-emotional-metaphor of "November Spawned A Monster" resurfaces in "You Were Good In Your Time" (along with an extremely Smiths-like movie dialogue sample that I haven't identified yet), "It's Not Your Birthday Anymore" is an obvious variation on the theme of "Unhappy Birthday", only this time it's feuding lovers and not a case of pure vengefulness-- but he does so in a fragmented, arbitrary way, tossing out random images that in no way serve the song. There's no sense of cohesion or even sense to many of these songs, and "One Day Goodbye May Be Farewell" may be at once the most clunkily straightforward and the most willfully obscure lyric he's ever written. That same song is an example of another problem with the album-- all too frequently, he seems to have gotten lazy and forgotten to actually finish the damn song. Laziness is also the only possible explanation for "Black Cloud", which sounds like an attempt to land a song on the next Guitar Hero or Rock Band and is full of bottom-of-the-barrel lines about unrequited love, and "Sorry Doesn't Help", which is pretty much self-explanatory.

As for Morrissey's voice: it's not much different from usual, except that he seems to be straining to sound younger, rather than just accepting that he can't hit those high notes the way he used to and going for a more Sinatra-influenced vocal approach as he did on Ringleader Of The Tormentors. So while the album is still frequently pleasant to listen to in spite of its lyrical blunders, the frequent resorts to that upper register aren't very pleasant at all.

All this probably makes it sound like I really hate Years Of Refusal. I don't, simply because it does have some decent songs and I doubt I could ever entirely hate something by Morrissey, whatever its weaknesses. But there's no question the album is a serious disappointment, and despite what some of the more zealous fans are saying on fan forums, there's no way it can stand with his best work. Sure, there's no single song on it as bad as "Sorrow Will Come In The End", but that's no excuse for patent laziness and a general lack of creativity.