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CD Review: Adam Ant’s ‘Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter’

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Matt Wardlaw

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Adam Ant
Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter
Three and a half stars

After a rough decade that included a well-publicized struggle with mental illness, new-wave icon Adam Ant files a fairly solid rebound with his first album in 17 years (with help from co-producer Boz Boorer and original Adam and the Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni), which he calls a “type of musical autobiography.” Tracks like “Stay in the Game” and “Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter” prove that Ant hasn’t lost any of the swagger that powered his earlier catalog. Occasionally, things get a bit bizarre, with the schizophrenic voice collage that emerges on “Valentines” and “Darlin’ Boy,” colliding and contracting like mental bumper cars in a way that will make you question your own lucidity. The heaviest moment on the album, “Shrink,” is an industrial brick bath that finds Ant raging with white-hot precision, wondering aloud “Is it just me/or is it just medication?” while enthusing that “a fist in the skulls is worth two in the bush.” Put that on a T-shirt.

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