STACK #263 September 2026

MUSIC FEATURE

visit jbhifi.com.au/stack

Y

A

I

I

L

L

T

N

V

V

Words Paul Jones

THE SMITHS BEST... I & ...BEST II F ew bands in music history polarise audiences as decisively as The Smiths. orchestrated melancholy of their final releases. more textured terrain, evidence of a band growing more ambi tious even as internal fractures pulled them apart.

Johnny Marr’s guitar work remains utterly audacious – never content to simply strum behind a vocal, he layers, plunders unconventional open tunings, stretches fingers across impossible chords, and conjures entire moods. He draws as much from Motown pop as from post-punk austerity. It’s guitar music that refuses to abide by the rules. Morrissey, of course, is the other half of this equation – a vocalist who turned self-pity into high art, delivering couplets that are as funny as they are anguished, often within the same breath. Even now, his phrasing retains that peculiar Mancunian theatri cality: never quite ironic, never quite sincere, always some where thrillingly in between. Best... I skews towards the earlier material’s brightness and bite; ... Best II drifts into darker,

Possibly the very definition of a love-it-hate-it band, Morrissey and Johnny Marr were a creative powerhouse duo for only five short years, between 1982 and 1987, before personal differences led The Smiths to disband. In credibly, during that brief tenure, the band recorded four studio albums. These two fresh compilation reissues, originally released in 1992, land in an era saturated with algorithmic playlists and disposable pop, providing a reminder of what a genuinely complete artistic statement sounds like – even one stitched together from a catalogue that the band themselves dismantled in 1987. Split across two volumes, Best I and II trace The Smiths’ arc from the wiry, chiming urgency of their Rough Trade beginnings to the richer, more

Taken separately, each record holds up in its own right; togeth er, they form an excellent insight into the band’s brief yet visionary career. Purists will insist the studio al bums, sequenced and contextu alised as their makers intended, remain the true way into The Smiths. But for the uninitiated, or those simply craving the hits, these compilations do the job admirably – capturing a band that burned fast, burned brilliantly, and left behind a body of work still being unpacked, quoted, and argued over nearly four decades on. TOP TRACK: How Soon Is Now? FAST FACT: Neither Morrissey nor Marr had any say in picking or sequencing the tracks. Warner assembled the track lists for both albums, yet Best... I still went straight to number one.

Both covers use the same striking ‘Biker Couple, 1961’ split image. Taken in 1961, actor Dennis Hopper’s raw, cinematic couple portrait later became one of his most reproduced photographs. THE COVERS

BACK DECKS ON THE

TROYE SIVAN Blue Neighbourhood (Ten Years On)

LANA DEL REY Honeymoon

FLORENCE + THE MACHINE Lungs

ARIANA GRANDE Yours Truly

GREAT VINYL BACK IN STOCK AT

*While stocks last

XX XXXXXXX 2026

jbhifi.com.au