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This box of remastered editions of Smiths albums-- four studio records, three compilations of the singles and one-offs, one live obligation-- would cement their reputation for brilliance and perversity, if it needed cementing. "Complete", however, is a profoundly inaccurate description.

There have been better bands than the Smiths, but there has never been a more perfect band, in the sense of having a distinct, deliberate, powerful aesthetic shaped by the tensions of collaboration, combined with the ability to articulate that aesthetic. This box of newly remastered editions of their albums-- four studio records, three compilations of the singles and one-offs that were their greater strength, one live obligation-- would cement their reputation for brilliance and perversity, if it needed cementing.

From the Smiths' first single, "Hand in Glove", in the spring of 1983, to their breakup barely four years later, everything about them seemed like a considered and ingenious decision: their name's undertones of both facelesness and creativity, the way each of their records began with a different sort of guitar tone, the tinted monochrome photos on their sleeves, their proudly ashamed fascination with their home town of Manchester, the three-song EPs they released every few months as bulletins of their evolution, their shoplifting excursions through the used-singles bins of British popular music. (One of the small pleasures of working backward through pop history from the Smiths is stumbling across Sandie Shaw's "Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now" or Reparata and the Delrons' "Shoes", for instance, and thinking ohhh, now I get it.)

The most obvious source of their genius was their singer, lyricist, and spokesman, Morrissey, a career eccentric who idolized Oscar Wilde and took a similar delight in pissing off anyone who had preconceived notions about masculinity. (Or, for that matter, men's singing voices, or what lyrics could and couldn't say, or whether or not it was a good idea to sing lines twice in a row if he was particularly proud of them.) His singing, then as now, was wildly affected and wildly virtuosic, bursting with growls and whoops and sly over-enunciations. And his lyrics and delivery were very, very deeply steeped in the history of gay culture, not least that in that they mimed something like being closeted: Morrissey's claims to celibacy, and early Smiths' lyrical revulsion about sex in general, are kind of hilarious in the light of, say, shirtless Joe Dallessandro appearing on the cover of their first album.

But the Smiths weren't Morrissey-plus-some-musicians, despite what he'd later try to suggest. They had a magnificent rhythm section in bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, who were unflashy, tough, and supple. And they had guitarist and writer Johnny Marr, who was responsible for at least half of the Smiths' glory. It's hard to neatly describe what was so great about Marr, because he didn't have a particular gimmick or a signature sound; there are virtually no audible guitar solos on Smiths records. Instead, he worked up a different sound and technique for nearly every song in the band's discography--the breadth of his inventiveness is a good part of what's important about him.

It's safe to say that nobody else, before or since, has opened a significant rock album by hammering the bejesus out of the capoed, open-tuned chord that begins "The Headmaster Ritual"-- Marr has called his riff what Joni Mitchell "would have done had she been an MC5 fan." There also aren't a lot of new wave classics with guitar lines inspired by Ghanaian highlife (and a rhythm section that's basically just playing "You Can't Hurry Love"), but then there's "This Charming Man" to prove the rest of the world wrong. To have come up with the tone and riffs of "What Difference Does It Make?" or "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" or "London" would be a coup for any guitarist; to have come up with all of them is astonishing.

Released in early 1984 after a couple of singles (and rapturous British press) had built up a buzz around the band, The Smiths is a terrific record, and also a slightly frustrating one: It's not quite the Smiths as we know them. (If they'd all perished in a terrible double-decker bus plunge immediately after its release, it'd certainly still be some kind of cult item, but we'd think of them as a much grimmer band, much more rooted in the smoky, post-punk worldview.) Starting a debut album with a slow, six-minute song that hints at working out memories of child abuse through painful sex ("Reel Around the Fountain") was a particularly audacious move, undercut by overdubbed lounge-act keyboards played by Paul Carrack (the guy who'd sung Squeeze's "Tempted"). Most of Morrissey's lyrics on The Smiths, in fact, allude to awful doings involving adults and children-- its closing track, "Suffer Little Children", is explicitly about the Moors murders.

Musically, they weren't entirely on track yet: Mike Joyce's drums have that big, early-MTV boom, Morrissey's showing off his voice's capabilities even when he doesn't have much of a melody to apply them to, and the bizarre punk rock speed-up of "Miserable Lie" doesn't particularly suit them. But their aesthetic was already wholly formed-- the album's murk, sexual frankness, and situational ambiguity were a reaction against the British pop landscape of its time. The Smiths were already a singles band, too, and the album goes from "quite good" to "remarkable" halfway through, when Marr breaks into the delicious opening riff of "This Charming Man" and Morrissey finally gets laid.

Released nine months after The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, a thrown-together collection of radio sessions predating the studio album and tracks from singles, could've been a lesser companion piece to it. Instead, it's a masterpiece, a snapshot of a band moving too quickly to get a bead on. It's a much happier album than The Smiths-- the sequencing turns Hatful's miscellany into something like a narrative about pickups and breakups and relationships, and ending with the combination of "Reel Around the Fountain" and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" pulls off the neat trick of casting both of them as hopeful songs. The BBC session tracks have an offhanded spark and swing unmatched in the Smiths' catalog; the recent singles Hatful collects have a sense of delight that made the band whole. ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" may be the most lighthearted song ever written about suffocating despair.) How wonderful were they at that moment? Both "How Soon Is Now?" and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" had just seen release for the first time as the B-sides to "William, It Was Really Nothing".

Meat Is Murder-- which followed Hatful by a mere three months-- is better recorded than The Smiths, although it's more a bunch of songs that didn't fit on singles than a coherent album. When it's good, it's great: "The Headmaster Ritual", especially, is full of chills-down-the-spine moments from Morrissey (the wordless, yodeling chorus that rhymes with "I want to go home/ I don't want to stay," the second verse's thrilling deviations from the first). "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" is a legitimately uncanny slow one that builds up to a bullseye triple-entendre-- "it was dark as I drove the point home"-- then recedes, surges back up, and fades away again. Still, Morrissey's often painfully out of tune on Meat's lesser songs, and a lot of tracks here stretch out at considerable length. That works remarkably well for "Barbarism Begins at Home", seven minutes of tense funk, but flops for the title track's tedious, eye-rollingly earnest animal-rights manifesto.

1986's The Queen Is Dead is the one studio album where the Smiths are operating at top capacity all the way through: they're aggressive, funny, rueful, tuneful, inventive, cryptic, tender, murderously furious at everything from Dear Old Blighty to their own miserablist selves, and let's underscore that "funny" again. Morrissey's refusing to take anything entirely seriously, particularly matters of life and death (you can practically hear him waggle his eyebrow as he tells Her Majesty "you should hear me play pi-anner")-- he's got his wrist taped to his forehead, but he's giggling about it. He's singing magnificently (those falsetto gasps in "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" are unbeatable), Marr's redefining "guitar hero" to have absolutely nothing to do with machismo (he effectively invents reggaebilly on "Frankly, Mr. Shankly"), and the band's at ease with its capacity to speak for every sullen, curious, baffled teenager. Morrissey and Marr's production sounds remarkably undated, too-- the marvelous line in "Bigmouth Strikes Again" about Joan of Arc's Walkman is now an anachronism twice over, but otherwise the album could pass for a really great product of 2011.

Even after The Queen Is Dead, the Smiths kept cranking out those three-song EPs, so two competing anthologies of their creative overflow appeared in early 1987. The World Won't Listen came out in the U.K. five weeks before Louder Than Bombs appeared in the U.S. They've got 12 songs in common, some in slightly different versions; of the five other songs on World, three are reprised from The Queen Is Dead and one from Meat Is Murder, and the last is an instrumental. The World Won't Listen starts very strongly-- its first half is singles and might-as-well-have-been-singles-- and then dissolves into a mess of slow, maudlin songs, interrupted by the chirruping of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby".

Louder Than Bombs augments the 12 core tracks with the not-yet-on-album-in-America songs from Hatful of Hollow, along with the material from the "Sheila Take a Bow" single. It's much better sequenced than World, arranged into four six-song suites on the original double LP: hard-headed rockers about being a socially maladjusted freak (plus "Half a Person", a soft-skinned lament about the same thing); warped pop songs about frustrated desire (plus "Panic", a rewrite of T. Rex's "Metal Guru" about the same thing); guitar showcases about being trapped inside one's own thoughts (plus "Ask", a singalong about how hot sex could free you, yes you, from that trap); and a progressively more relaxed series of meditations about how even hot sex may still not make you want to live.

The Smiths broke up a few months after they recorded 1987's Strangeways, Here We Come, so it's tempting to hear it as a premonition of the band's doom, as opposed to the album with "dead" in its title, the album with "murder" in its title, or the album about murdered children. Even more than that, though, it's the Smiths' album about desperately trying not to repeat themselves: Their final single couldn't have had a cleverer title than "Stop Me if You Think You've Heard This One Before". Morrissey's shifting into his now-familiar lyrical mode of deliberate self-parody ("Death at One's Elbow" is effectively a camped-up burlesque of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"); Marr's doing his best to avoid the tingling Rickenbacker picking that was the closest thing he had to a default sound. That's generally a good idea here-- the autoharp he plays on the group's leavetaking, "I Won't Share You", is thrilling-- although the orchestral whomp on a few songs is overdoing it. And the fact that they're devoting so much energy to a song about being annoyed by the record business suggests that they might have been about to pass their sell-by date anyway.

To be fair, "Paint a Vulgar Picture" is both funny and painfully accurate about the fate of the Smiths' music after the Morrissey/Marr team split. Rank, released after Morrissey had launched his solo career, is useful as the Smiths' only full-on live album, and as a document of the brief era when Craig Gannon was their second guitarist (the Queen Is Dead tour, basically). It's also a contractually obligated piece of barrel-scraping, and the onstage Smiths were not what they'd once been-- they would play only six more complete gigs after the one recorded here. They're still pretty on-point, and it's fun to hear them swing through a verse of Elvis Presley's "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame" as an introduction to "Rusholme Ruffians", but it's uncharacteristically inessential.

And then there was nothing left to do but reissue! Repackage! Remaster! Complete follows the Best... sets, Singles, The Very Best of the Smiths, The Sound of the Smiths, and a few other cash-ins (even this set has an ultra-limited and exceedingly pricey deluxe version). The new mastering job, by Frank Arkwright working with Marr, actually is really good: loud but not bomb-level loud, clear, and airy. (Hatful of Hollow, in particular, is dramatically improved from its previous incarnations.) On the other hand, "Complete" is a profoundly inaccurate description of this set. Including both The World Won't Listen and Louder Than Bombs exceeds completeness; omitting the band's non-album tracks means the loss of some decent-to-terrific live B-sides, a bit of later-period filler, and the magnificent "Jeane". Well, they never claimed not to be perverse.

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