Inside this sleekly designed metallic-looking package with the odd name - which doesn't contain a single Smiths cover - can be found the outline of a new movement: a deeply melodic strain of instrumental electronic pop-rock that is the romantic shadow to Detroit and Cologne's post-modernism. Berliner Thomas Morr's Morr Music has for the past year been releasing sketches of utopian snap-crackle-pop techno, with the exclusively fantastic results including Viennese B. Fleischmann's Pop Loops for Breakfast and Herman & Kleine's Kickboard Girl. On Putting the Morr Back in Morrissey, these sketches coalesce into an international ambient-pop underground, an assemblage of mostly bedroom musician/composers with ears focused on future sounds, unwilling to sacrifice hooks and harmonies.
Seemingly, the sun around which Morr revolves is the decade-old German quartet the Notwist, whose members play in more side-projects than the Tortoise guys and who contribute to more than a third of the 28 tracks. Helping to describe the universe here is the millennial synth-pop of Lali Puna's "Don't Think" and the laptop-electro noir of Kevin & Paul's "Die Wunderbaren Jahre" (RealAudio excerpt), not to mention the Notwist's own "Scoop," their pre-Radiohead take on space-trumental rock-tronica. But bright constellations are scattered everywhere on the two discs, from the magnificent beatless ambience of Manufacture's "Swollen Car" to the digi-pop scat cut-ups of Flowchart's remix of Lali Puna's "Fast Forward" (RealAudio excerpt>). Morr in Morrissey feels like a brilliant emotive whole, a musical galaxy birthed all at once while everyone was looking but no one was paying attention.
