Stan Ridgway
The Big Heat

THE REVIEW

More than twenty years ago, there was a group in America that offered a very interesting version of electronic country with sick tones and sometimes danceable beats typical of new-wave. The singer was someone named Stan Ridgway, who left after the excellent "Call Of The West".
It took four years before his solo debut could happen, but it was worth the wait because the album in question is one of the great classics of the '80s.

A refined and original songwriter, Ridgway entrusted his music to electronic arrangements sometimes similar to English techno-pop, but with a decidedly greater depth. His melodies, which inherited the tradition of western and noir film soundtracks, his unmistakably nasal voice, his distinctly "American" pronunciation, but above all his stories of failures and drifters, outcasts and addicts, created a nocturnal atmosphere, like a deserted metropolitan landscape. His visions were walks through notorious alleyways abandoned by "civilization," and the album cover is a clear confirmation of this.

The pressing pace of the title track renders an almost spectral landscape, with a distant and threatening harmonica, all melting into a chorus that even hits the charts, a perfect auteur synth-pop.
The syncopated pace of "Can't Stop The Show" alternates funky bass snippets with dark electronics, then melts into a delicate invocation. The arrangements are always detailed, complex, pleasant, and never heavy. The cheerful "Pile Driver" eases the tension a bit, which then drops again in the dreamy swing-pop of "Walking Home Alone," an elegant ballad enhanced by the soft cries of a jazz trumpet.
The highlight of the album is yet to come. It is the splendid "Camouflage," an epic western-paced ride, as captivating as few others, with a chorus that feels like an anthem to freedom, to the boundless spaces of a desert, to the adventure of a lifetime. Ridgway's voice becomes prophetic, chanting his sentences of condemnation, carried to triumph by the intertwining of keyboards, guitars, and banjo. Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful tracks of the '80s, which consecrates this album among the milestones of auteur songwriting.

If you haven't done so, give it a listen; you may not like it, but it's a work of great originality, as well as of excellent craftsmanship.