Grayer, pudgier, more dapper, but still laying his lonely intelligent heart across lush pop, Morrissey has crafted this year's most wry album to date: You Are the Quarry. Actually, on the cover it appears "Morrissey, you are the Quarry" - the comma completes a curious sentence, and one that appropriately defines the aging icon's approach to songwriting. Many listeners have adored Morrissey's atypical, miserable, and literate persona for years because they saw themselves as atypical, miserable, and educated. But at the heart of this adoration is the truth of what Morrissey keeps trying to say in song after song: we are each so alone. His lyrics are about what it's like to be Morrissey, or to be different variations of his soul. He is his quarry.

The single "Irish Blood, English Heart" (the title tangentially reaffirming the Mozzer's devotion to kindred spirit Oscar Wilde) introduces the notion of identity, on both the individual and the national level. Its persona is the voice of a passive reformer complaining about the current state of what it means to be English, politically and culturally mired in rigid tradition. Musically, it is the album's hardest rocker, recalling the similarly anti-establishment-themed anthem "The Queen is Dead" from the Smiths album of the same title. Listen for a whooshing keyboard effect and Boz Boorer's stop-on-a-pence guitar wail. In a typical Morrissey contradiction, this track follows the opener "America is not the World," a cruder but nonetheless critical portrait of the current American identity ("well America/ you know where you can shove your hamburger").

The drolly titled "I Have Forgiven Jesus" contains some of the record's bleakest, and hence most quintessentially Morrisseyian, lines: "I have forgiven Jesus/ for all of the love/ he placed in me/ when there's no one I can turn to with this love." It's a brilliant and brutally cynical reversal of the typical relationship more devout Christians share with Him, taking the view that pain is the only inevitable result from human relationships. It also postures Morrissey in a position of power over the Son of God.

"Come Back to Camden" is an ambiguous (sentimental/mock-sentimental) ballad very much in the style of Elvis Costello (although at some of its more dramatic moments Morrissey sounds more like latter-day Elvis Presley). The title references London's Camden Town, a neighbourhood teeming with punk fashion, tattoo & piercing joints, and small but raucous pubs, including one that gave birth to both Madness and Blur.

Although the titles "The World is Full of Crashing Bores" and "How Could Anyone Possibly Know How I Feel?" more than speak for their content, they are still superbly arranged pop-songs about alienation. And no one else has the courage to write a love song in which the lover begs "Close your eyes/ and think of someone/ you physically admire/ and let me kiss you." Despite the fathoms of insecurity inherent in his lyrics, Morrissey always projects confidence and charm. On the cover, he's groomed and suited, oddly glancing at the tommy gun in his hands as if unsure of what he might do with it while well aware of its power. And of course, the backdrop is a luscious pink satin scrim. Much of Morrissey's appeal has always been the icon status he so deliberately (and so successfully) cultivated during his rise in the 1980s, and Quarry's cover art adds another picture to the collage.

Or the cover could be a shout-out/mock-out to Hispanic communities in southern California, oddly enough one of the most fervent fan demographics Morrissey's solo career has. The bouncy, synth-fringed elegy "The First of the Gang To Die" confirms this, as he croons "Hector was the first of the gang/ with a gun in his hand/ and the first to do time/ the first of the gang to die/ oh my." Black comedy or pot-shot? It's tough to decide, but one of the album's sublime moments is the song's closing fugue, punctuated with pretty trills and flourishes in Morrissey's trademark breathy falsetto.

Another highlight is "I Like You," a subversive take on the "nascent love" theme common to pop-dom. In it, the self-deprecating persona confesses "why do you think I let you get away/ with the things you say to me?/ Could it be I like you?/ It's so shameful of me/ I like you."

If this review has been quote-heavy, it's only because that's where most of the beauty is to be found on You are the Quarry. The song's structures are conventional, but they contain the unique and inventive expression of this singular (un)loveable whiner.