My Review: Adrian Borland - Beautiful Ammunition

Adrian Borland - Beautiful Ammunition

"Stress, anxiety, depression arise when we ignore who we are and start living to please others" - Paolo Coelho

There are years that resemble storms, precipitous, wanting to reset the Earth system, in all its functions.

In 1994, Soundgarden's Superunknown, The Cranberries' No Need to Argue, Jeff Buckley's Grace and Nirvana's Unplugged were released.

And then Adrian Borland.

The singers of all these bands are souls who now perform in the sky, amidst hardships, comforts and scours inaccessible to us.

If the Old Scribe has to choose which of these albums best blended dream, positivity, shadow, frost and thaw, the flow of light-seeking impetuses, there is no doubt that the former Sound leader's is the one to look at most deeply, given the enormous flow of elements that made his third but first true solo album the one closest to a human miracle. 

There are rainbow signs, splashes of a mind trying to repair the damage of a circuit injured and weakened by precise abuse, as there are also parachutes, slingshots, the sweat of an avalanche that seeks a sincere mirror in the writing of music. Adrian creates a set of songs with the intention of sheltering himself even more from disillusionment, he who had invested dreams and reality to bring his talent to the world stage. He had failed, as had his fellow travellers who had made the Sound into knights in fine uniforms but losers. Here we seem to see (at last, I might add) a writer capable of using bridges and reflections to tap into musical genres that are little practised or difficult to associate with his path. 

Courageous, epidermic, uncompromising, sweet, romantic, he does not fail to give brushstrokes of his frustrated psyche, but with the intention of putting a candle in the verses and above all in the sound system, where semi-acoustic guitars take over and he tries to play with changes of atmosphere, of rhythm, to bring his powerful sensibility to the edges of a more pop and songwriting construction, skimming the paths of Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley and Neil Young. 

No comparisons, but only the intention to highlight the true nature of a soul that seeks to lighten the sharp blades of its electric guitar and its voice, which, in this work, is in a medium-low register and when it reaches for the sky, it does so without shouting, crying or intent on making the lack of oxygen heard.

The personal pronoun I is used within an almost total absence of interlocutors, and it seems as if we are in the vessel of a Storytelling full of water to be cradled, cared for and scattered away from those fingers that in this record prefer to divert the electric current to favour places that can offer a minimum of serenity. 

If one digs inside the lyrics, bitterness, disappointment, anger are replaced by helplessness, resignation and an incredible positivity that puffs, pushes, wants to emerge and swim in those days that seem to be built to give his feet a safer path to walk on.

We witness a process conceived and executed almost entirely by Borland, displaying eclecticism, determination and a desire for the intimacy that he had somehow always denied himself. Compared to the first two works without the Sound, this one seems to be a confidential conversation with a mind that breaks free from its clichés to structure new hypotheses. 

Sure, the production is close to perfection, the songs, while not showing the idea of being prone to the zone of conquering the masses of listeners (they never took the risk, to tell the truth, and it was certainly for the best), seem to assert an independence, as if the moment should be historic for them in particular. But you get a strange feeling: you can sense how sixteen ivies are full of a poison with a deceptive face, like a scam that rock can no longer afford. 

Adrian tries to write atypical ballads, often forcing the colour of the sound, sometimes kneading the acoustic and electric zones like a clown playing, clumsily (but only apparently) with pain, only to regret it and pull down the shutter and plunge them into the usual darkness...

One cries, with a spiritual stature unscathed by the passing of time, to smile and embrace the future, and then that song in which he seems to paint a ray of sunshine never seen before: the door is open...

But Beautiful Ammunition is a confetti that knows how to lose its colours, to fall quickly, to get stuck under the carpet, to stick to the skin, like a pleasant nuisance from which it is impossible to separate. His singing makes the famous nerves flex, calculates new spaces, scours unimaginable visual trajectories and seems to run slowly, in a dutiful and ultimately heartbreaking oxymoron.

Nothing to be done: suffering has not abandoned him, but has at least allowed him to look up and make him believe that the present and the future are no longer enemies who look at each other in the eye.

When the tones become dramatic, fear clutches our hearts, we become accomplices in its fragility and tears well up.

The more delicate work in the lyrics is accompanied by sound graffiti that seem far removed from the dramatic, but often one notices how no one can renounce the other: the war of words, the almost rambling, the lowest points, are as if rebuked by the stave that would like a writing free of sadness. Mission impossible, but everything risked reaching the colours of Harlequin's mask. 

How much beauty, irrefutable, is offered by this exercise, this struggle with the tattoo of an armistice, which is manifested in the totality of an album that does not photograph but writes destiny, like a post-dated identity that will find its precision and its eternal painful form on 26 April 1999...

All that remains now is to walk out of that open door, take Adrian by the hand and go for a nice walk with this clean-faced river that, if you stop to look at it, in its obscene depth, will make your legs shake...

Song by Song

1 - Re-united States of Love

'Redraw the map, push the frontier back'

A beginning that seems like a farewell: there is nothing clear except in the notes of a guitar and drums that try to stop the words, but nothing stops the vocals, on the chorus with Vikki Stilwell (present in several episodes on the album), from tracing a smile

2 - Open Door

'I've felt the darkness of the world, but now I need some light'

Lou Reed faces off, as Church and Alarm seem to do, in a gathering that smells of the eighties, with the song searching for footholds in its past. Glowing on a rainy day.

3 - Rocket

"We could blast right of here if you put some thrust in me"

The applause from heaven seeks Adrian's fingertips and his uvula: like Joyce's tale, everything seems to yearn for spring. The electric guitar seems to smell of e-bow, but then slips into a semi-blues approach...

4 - Stranger in the Soul

"But I don't feel the pain that loneliness brings".

One of the most poignant episodes of this prickly soul: he digs, he fumbles, with a circular guitar that tries to extricate loneliness from his hips, in a tangle of emotions in which nothing changes but one wants to pretend otherwise. The stop and go shows us delicacy, almost Spanish-like notes, and a sun inclined to fall...

5 - Break My Fall

"You'll break my fall and my heart will never know".

Initial echoes of the Cocteau Twins are immediately halted by Adrian's voice, which cadencedly advances into the trap of reality, gracefully scampering through the burrow of depression...

6 - Station of the Cross

"I can't relive each moment when I got too close to truth".

The programming finds its apotheosis, new solutions ride the scene, in an excellent musical guise full of novelty. The piano chords are chasms, while the angelic voice flies through the sentimental labyrinth colouring the trust and stopping the pain...

7 - Simple Little Love

"They took apart your simple heart with their calculating minds".

The rhythm becomes close to country again, with the American thrust of the world's most famous dream entering the verses, then catapulting the Australian attitude of the aforementioned Church into a swinging rhythmic whirlwind...

8 - White Room

'Can't you see how this splits me then you'll see how I crack'

Radiohead were able to take their cue, like many other bands, from this irresistible and heartbreaking track: even grief has poetry at its centre of gravity and Adrian has found it, recorded it, performed it, with the music sounding like a slide that, starting from childhood, concludes its wanderings into death

9 - Past Full of Shadow

"Between the lines you misread the signs".

When the author of Winning decides to take our breath away, we don't stand a chance: the perfect production gives the song the right amount of drama, in a suffocating circuit that yearns for the white skin of a soul now extinguished. Signs of arrangements and rainbows full of rain give the piece the Nobel Prize for the most tears shed...

10 - Ordinary Angel

"I tasted grace and got drunk on bliss"

There's running, pubic-adjacent sounds, tumbling and rolling in the alcoholic meadow of a dream never so seemingly free, with the electric guitar propelling Adrian into the high register of his voice to caress the clouds where angels await...

11 - Lonel Late-nighter

"A song in the sad key from the heart of man tell me not to be ashamed to cry"

How to connect the ballads of the eighties to the yet-to-be-broken-in ballads of the nineties: Borland searches for the refrain, the swinging vocal, to find the tears free to melt away. One of the most verisimilarly pop moments of the whole album: gorgeous, innocent and cruel at the same time...

12 - Someone Will Love You Today

"Could be the man who sells you the paper a cynical sparkle of hope in his smile"

U2 will be jealous (Gloria, that is), as Adrian Borland demonstrates a talent the Irish never had: how to switch from irony, to a pop drop that invokes the alternative and then ramps up, with extreme simplicity, in a refrain swollen with air to kiss, until the final drops of a guitar in the smell of J.J. Cale.

13 - Forgiveness

"But we are full of pollutants"

The winter of the mind arrives, the footsteps become slow and the shadows gloomy, camouflaged strings throw their strains into the lyrics that dismay but specify the path of an existence in search of help. When the two registers of voice are in unison, there is no longer any possibility of resisting the pain...

14 - Rootless

"I've been sawing through these chains".

The most atypical track on this album, with its searching solutions, inventive singing, a scaffolding that seeks support in talent. Everything escapes and probably makes this episode the least convincing...

15 - In Passing

"These yellow lights are not enough to illuminate this night".

An arpeggio, a sky, a need that cannot find identity and permanence: the feeling is of a dutiful attempt to show the cracks in a mind that remembers days gone by and finds itself with empty glasses...

16 - Shoreline

"And you wish you had a life at least somebody you could die for, why don't you open up and breathe?"

The highest and most touching moment is reserved for the end: he who does not cry has no heart, no passions....

One enters the psyche of a dream, the contrast with the deafening noise of tragedy raging in the calendar and the gamble of not forcing one's hand. The words win, they steal the show, and the voice becomes the stage for a skull falling into the sand still covered in skin and heartbeats. By the time you glide into the refrain the tears have oxidised...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th April 2024