Meat Is Murder

The Smiths' second album is their most strident and politically charged record — the band's only UK number one, and a clear step up in aggression and musical range from the 1984 debut. Marr's writing branches out from jangling guitar pop into rockabilly, a seven-minute funk workout, and hard, mid-tempo rock, all of it more cleanly and confidently produced than before. At its best — the cold, furious opener about institutional cruelty, the swinging fairground vignette, and the album's quiet, aching ballads — it shows the band at its most muscular and most tender, and many retrospective critics call it their most consistent record even while stopping short of calling it their best.

The recurring criticism is Morrissey's sermonizing. The title track, a slow, grim animal-rights polemic built on recorded slaughterhouse noise, is the album's most notorious moment: even admirers routinely single it out as the weakest song and the record's heaviest-handed gesture, and a notable dissenting minority has dismissed the whole album as tuneless, self-parodic moralizing. Some critics also find that several songs rework the debut's lyrical and musical ideas without adding many fresh hooks, and a common view holds the record uneven — a set of strong songs that never quite coheres into a statement as focused as the band's later work.

The disagreement that runs through the reception is whether the earnestness is the record's great strength or its liability. Admirers read it as a genuinely humane album — empathy for outsiders and misfits threaded through fury at institutions — while detractors hear self-righteous hectoring. What is rarely disputed is the quality of the best songs, the band's confidence in sounding like nothing else around them in 1985, or the fact that this was the moment the Smiths became a genuine mainstream force in Britain. (Listeners should know the US edition's appended "How Soon Is Now?" changes the album's balance considerably, and that the title track's audio is genuinely difficult to sit through.)