Stan Bush
Every Beat of My Heart

Stan Bush, “Every Beat of my Heart” (1992), LA Records

Where were we? Fresh from the triumphs of the “Transformers”, Stan Bush confirms he hasn’t betrayed the orders received from the stratosphere of the lords of AOR.

The dance opens with “Straight to the Top”: a pressing pace, although not entirely convincing. The verse is better than the somewhat banal chorus, good only as a soundtrack for a sitcom filmed in a Creole basement; the voice seems like that of a queen transformed by parthenogenesis into a romantic breeding bull. What a drag.

“Can’t Hide Love” is simply a devastating, melodramatic atout. A refrain from a thousand and one nights, heart-pounding arrangement and verse in neon, a syncopated solo with fire and brimstone, a bridge for the late night hours yet discreetly modest.

Also remarkable is the party rock of “It don’t get better than this”, enhanced by a text almost Spenglerian: “turn on the lights/this night’s gonna last forever […/] there’s no turning back/it has to be now or never/more than a moment, more than a kiss/it don’t get better than this”. Splendid are the choruses and lascivious counterpoints of Stan’s unknown Black female companions (Spengler would not have appreciated), whose interpretation here is like “Reader’s Digest” for melanin-deficient people. References to certain works by Rettore and Locasciulli, filtered with almost rococo taste. Listen to it, when in the wholesome company of your loved one, and things aren’t going as they should. You will see: everything will fall back into place, and she, from the attic where her father affiliated with the European Liberation Front mercifully locked her, will greet you with a smile worth all the timeless dawns of Thule.

“Never Ending Love” is a new, luxurious ballad centered on the theme of love, treated without pretense a la Ron Moss. An acrobatic bass introduces a raspy and tormented mood—much like Zimmerman’s evacuations on Thanksgiving Day, but with much more grace—, fresh out of a take of “The Blue Lagoon”. The bridge is majestically melancholic: it must have broken, we are reasonably sure, millions of tough guys with tender hearts, still hospitalized today at the Malibu UTIC for metamusic extrasystoles. We, having just listened to it, stood in devout posture in front of Stan’s image, ready for a seppuku that somehow honored the Axis powers.

The chic rock of “Ain’t That Worth Something” is highly polished, reminding us of the best Eric Martin or certain works of Peter Beckett. The hand of Cain is felt. The bridge magnificently hints at the mystery of a thought kiss and four hands intertwining to draw a cosmological arabesque.

Smooth “Landslide”, which could teach any Nico the basics. The intro is immensely catchy, the refrain a la Mr Big recalls the themes touched by Malick in his latest “Song to Song”. An authentic anthem for uncorrupted hearts, to be tasted repeatedly with a nice ice cream on the beaches of Venice.

“Could This be Love” (not the one by Signal) is a half filler, perhaps from Vichy. Beautiful echoes of the embalmed patriarchs of the blues, to whom Stan pays homage, as the last distant but respectful white man of absolute otherness.

With “Full Circle” another present to the incestuous fathers of American tradition. On a quiet blues exoskeleton, the Bontempi keyboard iterates endlessly a theme à la “Love Boat”. Impressive hermeneutic openings in the midst of an inner landscape where one can reflect without covering their pudenda, finally returned ad integrum. Deo gratias.

More lively, almost rock’n’roll, indeed authentically shuffle, with beautiful effected ideas, is “Every Beat of My Heart”. Keep going, in the sky painted with blue of an LA now apocalyptically prone to the philosophizing Greyhound buses in the night. There’s no more for anyone.

“The Search is Over” (not that of the Survivor) is a sumptuous farewell, so garish that the keyboard line counterpointing the refrain seems fresh out of a session by Aleandro Baldi. A solemnly hieratic, solemn, majestic voice: enough to make one’s wrists tremble. A gut-wrenching and almost Pythagorean solo by Mike Landau, for Christ’s sake.

We believe we have written the definitive word on this damn album, practically unappreciated by no adept of the good lounges, but brutally looted by those many who pretend to prefer the first of the Stooges or “Malleus Maleficarum” by Pestilence: It is, in truth, a brilliant jumble of retrograde clichés and carefully wrought half-truths, on an aestheticizing and self-satisfied basis, for exhausted faces weary of too many sentimental riots. Bush is in fact endowed, besides having an adamantine musical talent, with an exceptional taste for FM plays. He is the perfect realization of the last Nietzschean man, an unparalleled singer of ecstasy who crosses nihilism and annihilates it with great taste: thus projecting his theoretical reflux on the deserving Black sources from which he draws freely, in these scrappy operations half between the sonic reconstruction of a universe layered in a thousand semantic streams and plagiarism of côté dithyrambic.

Hierarchy, honor, an uncompromising sense of distance and out-of-time testimony, therefore: among the ruins, certainly, but to conduct, through the cracks in the great wall, a reversion of influences and archaic qualities, of Gestalt Anglo-Aryan. Everything the West has irretrievably lost, in a catastrophe of which Scalfarotto's face constitutes the bohemian aspect, is originally re-elaborated in this extraordinary swan song, from AOR textbook: “The answer, of course, is yes. One day the sadness will end”.