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XL WEEKEND REVIEWS - Austin American Statesman

Music: No doubt, this was classic Morrissey
— Joe Gross

How do you know you're at a Morrissey show? Let us count the ways.

•Incidental music includes Sophie Tucker's "I'm Living Alone and I Like It" and T.Rex's glam-rock staple "Telegram Sam."

•Food sold at the show — in this case Saturday night at a packed Backyard — is exclusively vegetarian.

•Audience is a healthy mix of gay and straight. Audience clothing is healthy mix of black and Morrissey T-shirts. Audience hair is healthy mix of foppish, pompadoured or missing, especially if you're one of his older male fans.

•Everyone is excited to be there. Seriously, almost profoundly excited.

At 48, with his last two albums (the outta-nowhere 2004 comeback "You Are the Quarry" and last year's "Ringleader of the Tormentors") his best in 15 years, Morrissey has been given that rarest of pop gifts — a genuine third act.

One reason Morrissey's personality works so well at the cusp of 50 is that part of him was never young. Even as a twentysomething in the world-historical Britpop progenitors the Smiths, Morrissey was always this weird old biddy in love with Oscar Wilde, the New York Dolls and kitchen sink dramas stuffed inside a soft-bodied English fop.

In other words, a world-weary persona goes a lot better with actual middle age.

It doesn't hurt that while Morrissey speaks openly of his very specific influences — glam rock, '60s girl groups, rockabilly, punk's anyone-can-do-this attitude — his music is clearly far more than their sum.

He and his uniformed five-piece band opened with the Smiths' anthem "The Queen is Dead" before sailing into a dazzling array of Mozzer greatest tunes, from newish ("The First of the Gang to Die, "You Have Killed Me") to older solo smashes ("The Last of the Famous International Playboys," "Everyday is like Sunday") and Smiths classics ("Panic, "The Boy With the Thorn in His Side").

The band, led by longtime musical director Boz Borrer, emphasized the songs' sturdiness, their classic, big-chord structures that could be blown out into loud, broad-stroke rock. They even did well with more complicated material, summing up their skill set in the final songs. The proggy, seven-minute "Life is a Pigsty" faded into a piano chorus of "Auld Lang Syne" before crashing into a massive "How Soon is Now?" It was a perfect Morrissey moment — melodramatic, funny, expertly timed.

(XL is the Thursday entertainment pull-out section of the Austin-American Statesman)