Epitaphs

Luke Haines has achieved everything smashing that Morrissey used to be. How is he going to use it, eventually?

In popular music, nostalgy is the weapon of choice, and Luke Haines has always known how to handle it. On his new double album, 21st Century Man, he dwells even deeper in homesickness and feeling of bittersweet yearning, acknowledging both historical and sub-urban settings and a various crowd of artists from Kinski to Russian futurists during his mass. Klaus Kinski must be one of the most beautiful pieces of music recorded this year, alongside with Love Letter To London - whether it's the Weimaresque longing of Heimat in crippled and decadent post-war Berlin, or the memoirs of a war criminal exiled in a tropical paradise, Haines is able to create perfect imagery, realistic but romanticised at the same time.

Stephen Patrick Morrissey is another seminal figure who has been drawing his inspiration from the frozed-to-death-conservative British Ground. Both Haines and Morrissey speak the same language, that is high literature, and operate with the very same currency, that is, the imperial nostalgy, that is The Pound. While tapping his fingers into the thin sheet ice on a frozen lake for several years, he became elevated into a demigod, which finally more or less killed him as a person. By 1988, at the time of his first solo album, Morrissey was practically sitting on a goldmine. Now, twenty years later he has became nothing but a master in turning his artistic value into materialized value; a bankbook sturdy as his waist and a congregation of loyally attending fans who keep touring and recording profitable, even if the program would be more than shallow in tone & aesthetics. And pumped up with this treacherous battle-drug of ecstatic applause the old warrior keeps on going. Slamming his axe against the ice, now, instead of the wry, gentle, awkward knockings of Vauxhall And I, Morrissey is selling England by the pounding. He has turned his artistic currency into dollars and placed it in a low-risk investment, that keeps him moderately well-earned time after time, but which is an utter bore. A Fort Knox of yawns. A spider-web-laiden mausoleum where he has to hold in the humidity of his breath and the slightest whimper goes on echoing forever.

In this context Luke Haines is putting out something that Stephen Patrick never would. Not even in his worst nightmares. Haines is writing his last words as a 20th century artist, and declaring his birth as a 21st centurian. And he does it by simply announcing that he is a sentimental stuckist, and about to die in the 21st Century. There is no magnificent manifest of self-arrogancy - a formula that Morrissey has so succesfully utilized, strictly for the sake of a glamorous show that justifies the middle-aged faggot his existence, without any actual message behind the ceremonial pomp. This would almost tempt one to make a reference to the Emperor's New Clothes, if he wasn't so eager to decloak himself on stage, something one must appreciate from a man of his built.

Haines confesses that this might be his death as an musician. He states something artists have very hard time admitting; that he already made his masterpiece and is now playing with the left-over pieces of the puzzle. After this self-reflecting and non-feigned record, it will be very interesting to see how Haines is going to use his remaining capital. To build an idiot pensionary hooked on historism, or to boldly go - through some bizarre metamorphose. Maybe vanish into a superdense white dwarf of a star?

This apology of an album is accompanied by Achtung Mutha - a loosely themed collection of songs, built around The Great Brain Robbery. The spoken word performance of anti-Turnerian PoMo-conceptualism critique in form of a trepanation scene, divided into three tableaux, is an undeniable tribute towards Lou Reed's little twisted rock-novellas, but actually the result comes more closer to The Jeweller by John Cale with a little twist of Stuart Home. The result is not too original, but by a writer as talented as Haines the pastiche is so excellent you've just got to lay back and enjoy it. Very creepy. Very British. Rest of the tracks are short and vignette like, surrounding the backbone of the story, still all quite enjoyable. This is what still makes Haines interesting as a song-writer. His style is minimized and unpretentious. Haines' writing is never of epic quality, he writes ditties - and loads them full of emotion. Even a song as trivial as English Southern Man that seems completely worthless, is saved by a trick as simple as a charming synthesized chorus, totally out of place and corny for a track almost minimalistic in nature.

The tittle track of 21st Century Man is the only exception here, a throw-away melody where Haines actually tries to cram so much cheap & obvious nostalgy in to a autobiographical narrative, that it becomes absolutely pathetic. This kind of long poetic zeitgeist composition is a hard one to handle, and even challenging as a source of parody (see Gimme Indie Rock by Sebadoh). The result is an awful Forrest Gump of brit-pop. Pure sentimentality. Then again, right here he bluntly puts out the perfect motif of his album:

"What can you do when you've did your masterpiece, I did that in the nineties, I was all over the nineties"

Luke Haines: 21st Century Man
(Fantastic Plastic Records, 2009)
Record rating:
-21st Century Man 9.0/10
-Achtung Mutha 8.0/10