Donovan
Neutronica

Donovan, year 1980, increasingly outcast: the spotlight has definitively turned off, the self-titled album of three years earlier had badly closed his 70s: a commercial failure (but that's no surprise) and even an artistic one, the relationship with Mickie Most (partly responsible for the fiasco of "Donovan") ends definitively, and Our Man finds himself on the outskirts as never before. "Neutronica", his fifteenth studio album is distributed in France and West Germany by RCA, the USA and even the United Kingdom, his homeland, slam the doors in his face but despite all that, Donovan is reborn, "Neutronica", proudly self-produced, is not only a great album but shows a indomitable artist, still capable of renewing and surprising, this is more than just a simple album, it is the musical response to a rotten environment that had deliberately and arbitrarily ostracized him for ten years.

After the dull and unhappy phase of 1977 Donovan returns to having strong ideas, two in particular are the peculiarities of "Neutronica", two characteristics that make it unique and unmistakable in Donovan's discography: on a songwriting level, the so-called committed texts had never had particular relevance: scattered episodes like "Ballad Of A Crystal Man", "To Susan On The West Coast Waiting", "The Voice Of Protest" and "Cryin' Shame" are remembered, "Neutronica" instead is almost entirely focused on themes of denunciation: pacifism, antimilitarism, brotherhood, with a minor space dedicated to love, and on a musical level, electronics make their triumphant and bursting entrance: here the synthesizers dominate the scene and it is a perfectly successful experiment: "Neutronica" is an electronic album, strong, nervous, immediate, of great personality, in step with its times and charged with an expressive urgency that seemed like a distant memory.

The captivating "Ship Wreck" and especially its first 40 seconds immediately clarify the situation: the synthesizers create atmospheres of great emphasis and impact, Donovan manages them perfectly and the piece, just like the whole album, works perfectly: a tense and pressing ride, in which the electric guitar also peeks in, with a completely different incisiveness compared to the dismal rock episodes of "Donovan".

"Ship Wreck" is the cornerstone of the album, to which other electronic gems are added like the dramatic and pulsating j'accuse of "Only To Be Expected", marked by an uneasy piano line, the cadenced and almost robotic rhythm of "Coming To You", theatrical synth-pop branded with Donovan's quality mark, as well as the whimsical "Mee Mee I Love You", sung with an insinuating falsetto that hasn't been heard in a long time coupled with a hypnotic and futuristic electronic framework, and the more solemn "We Are One", contaminated by folk influences in a good compromise between old and new. The electronics spare not even a "nursery rhyme" like "Neutron", a sarcastic paean for an imaginary perfect bomb, with songs like this Donovan always plays it safe, he has them in his blood and even in this case the result is delightful, fun, and clever.

War is one of the focal themes of "Neutronica" and Donovan masterfully portrays it in its contrast of glory and misery by juxtaposing a traditional victorious chant like "The Heights Of Alma" with "No Man's Land" by Eric Bogle, a Scottish folksinger already author of the classic "And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda": the first, with its triumphant solemnity, is an epic portrait that references the Battle of Alma of 1854, a crucial episode in the Crimean War, framing it in a typically 19th-century idealistic dimension, still tied to the myth of heroic enterprise, while "No Man's Land" is a haunting acoustic ballad, where synthesizers are relegated to a purely marginal role, delivering a touching epitaph for an anonymous soldier of World War I, where the epic wanes, rhetoric falls away and only a reflection on the barbarity and futility of what is seen as nothing more than one of man's worst instincts remains. Both are perfect revisitations that enrich "Neutronica" both from a musical standpoint, re-establishing the link with Donovan's folk roots, and from the compositional depth of the work, completed by an heartfelt Elton John-style piano ballad like "No Hunger", and by "Madrigalinda", which as the name suggests is a sweet madrigal dedicated to his beloved wife Linda Lawrence.

This time it was really difficult to predict such a happy outcome for an album born with such discouraging prospects as "Neutronica", and yet the artist has overcome this trial in the best way: the 80s, with their overwhelming emergence of new sounds, have been a trap in which many have stumbled badly, but not Donovan who with "Neutronica" once again demonstrates remarkable chameleonic skills: a proud album, founded on solid and well-applied guidelines, strongly characteristic but rich in nuances as Donovan has always known how to do, this time with an entirely new guise, surprising if you think that our man started exactly fifteen years ago strumming "Catch The Wind".