Adam Ant
Wonderful

THE REVIEW

Many years have passed, quite a few actually... The eighties ended a long time ago, and so did the success. The beautiful Heather Graham left you quite a while ago: she couldn't stand your crises anymore, watching you slowly go mad...

It's 1995, grunge has been born and died, Tim Buckley's son too... Punk is no longer the one from Derek Jarman and his "Jubilee," but rather a pounding rhythm under a melody like a cartoon TV show theme... In England, the brit pop explodes from derivative strummers, more than musicians, many of whom don't even have the composition talent for such. And you? And you're getting old too, not just going crazy...

Your image can no longer be that of the sex symbol, your (pop)rock eros would be anachronistic, in these '90s that are modest and "interiorized," made up of personalities fragile like twigs that, in their songs, expose themselves to the painful winds of autobiography, and of presumptuous, brawling "working classers," falsely polite in words and truly nihilistic in actions and omissions. You, basically, how you were at twenty or thirty, would have been out of time in a decade like this. But you've changed, pain and a lack of success have changed you. But your music shows improvement, and not just due to an inevitable process of maturation.

Pieces of infinite class, starting from the first track, "Won't Take That Walk," half-rock, half-acoustic, sentimental but not erotic, which hardens while remaining soft. The same goes for the title track (which is worth one of Jeff Buckley's battle horses), "Yin & Yang," where Ant touches sound shores that, years later, would belong to Grandaddy in particular, and bedroom rockers in general. The lesson continues in the brit pop of "Gotta Be A Sin," a perfect hit if it had been put in the hands of Blur, or even better, the more sophisticated Suede.

In the middle, a sophisticated ragamuffin titled "Beautiful Dream," a slightly redundant experiment but not at all afflicted by Adam's historical self-indulgence. Again, a weakened glam titled "1969 Again"; a piece with a slightly American roots sound, yet with unexpected passages and a vaguely Texan special, titled "Image Of Yourself." And yet still a little bit of punk in the structure-taste of "Alien." In the penultimate track, "Angel," on a U2 bass a Simple Minds chorus. The album ends with a brilliant "industrial funky" titled "Very Long Ride," a piece that would at least make you doubt the genuineness of "Afraid Of Americans" by the Thin White Duke, one of the highlights from his "Earthling" (two years after this work by Adam Ant).

Great this Ant/Marco duo that, within a "contemporary" frame (I should say "coeval" since we are talking about twelve years ago), ends up inserting everything they like, smoothing out the rough edges (and banning the nonsense). An album of beautiful songs, many of which have original structures and are free from impositions/self-impositions. The album of a mature singer and a guitarist who would make the various "Noels" want to retire from the scene, but also the far more shrewd "Bernards" and "Grahams." The album of two composers with no path to follow, no standards to adhere to, no target to aim at... But just too much time without making music, the awareness of no longer being kids, and a taste for the delicatessen of Morrissey and Jeff the sad angel.

"Wonderful" won't be successful, like many other attempts by artists from the eighties to reclaim their spotlight. The tour organized even in America was interrupted due to an illness contracted by both Ant and Marco, while the record company stopped promoting the album. This damn bad luck further worsened Adam's health conditions, and the fans have been waiting for news (not from crime reports but musical) for twelve years now, while Adam's life only gets worse. Meanwhile, however, surely intrigued by the journalistic events (the arrests, the hospitalizations, the internments, the releases, the trials, the documents and documentaries), fans only continue to grow, adding up to the nostalgics. And much of this is also due to this album, free from first-hand exhibitionism and pointless flourishes, delicate and tasty enough to captivate even the inattentive listener, the one who "encounters" this album and, after listening to it, thinks to themselves: "wonderful".