Morrissey: California Son review – clumsy covers with a troll-like spirit

A week after Morrissey appeared on a late-night talk show wearing a badge in support of an anti-Islam, far-right minor political party (not to mention the preceding decade of contentious proclamations), it is impossible to hear a number of the covers on California Son in anything but a chilling light. Dylan’s Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the US government’s weaponising of poor white people in the civil rights movement, takes on a sinister tone. When Morrissey sings “You can do what’s right or you can do what you are told,” on Days of Decision, it resonates less as Phil Ochs’s original appeal to fairness than a slimy warning against falling in line with political correctness.

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Quite why Morrissey has decided to record an album of protest-adjacent covers at this point in his career is unclear. It hardly chimes with his public persona (although he is a known fan of original purveyors such as Jobriath). Nor does it bring out any hitherto untapped range. He wheezes through Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s Lady Willpower like an exhumed Tom Jones, and hearing him preening on Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow – given an arduously heavy makeover by his band – feels like a violation of Joni Mitchell’s mythically light original. There are vaguely intriguing gender wrinkles – he sings as the female protagonist of Melanie’s Some Say I Got the Devil, and pleads with Bill to get down on one knee on Laura Nyro’s Wedding Bell Blues – but such winking provocations are crushed by the troll-like spirit of the endeavour.