I can vividly remember walking home from a school fete at the tender age of nine, with a thick, white stripe of face paint proudly daubed across my nose and cheekbones. These days, no doubt kids would rather visit the face-painting stall to be made up as characters from the Harry Potter books and films, but in the summer of 1981 there was only one person I wanted to masquerade as: Adam Ant. <\/p>\n
By 1981, Adam and his dandified group of Ants were the biggest band in The album was Adam And The Ants\u2019 second LP release and followed the unremarkable post-punk leanings of their debut Dirk Wears White Sox<\/i>. Between the release of that first album and the arrival of the second, Adam had hooked up with ex-Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, whose major contribution seems to have been in persuading the original line-up of Adam\u2019s band to join nymphet vocalist Annabella Lwin to form Bow Wow Wow. <\/p>\n Undeterred, Adam hooked up with old friend and one-time Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist Marco Pirroni and proceeded to put together a new version of the Ants. Pirroni was to become a linchpin of the new band, co-writing almost all of the band\u2019s material with Adam and providing a distinctive, Duane Eddy-style guitar sound. <\/p>\n Interestingly, the new line-up was also to feature two drummers, helping to create a sound influenced by the thundering The record begins with the pounding, drum-heavy single \u201cDog Eat Dog\u201d and amid whistles and caterwauling backing vocals, the song sets forth its message of standing up tall and proud, no matter who you are or where you come from. Sounds like good advice, right? Well, actually, what Adam was really saying was to become a follower of Adam And The Ants and then<\/i> stand up tall and proud, a similar but decidedly less altruistic philosophy.<\/p>\n \u201cAntmusic,\u201d the second track on the album, starts off with the rhythmic clicking of drum sticks before evolving into a catchy, new wave-ish declaration of the band\u2019s superiority over all other \u2018pretenders\u2019 in the pop charts. The chorus lyrics tell you everything you need to know about the song\u2019s message, \u201cSo unplug the jukebox and do us all a favour \/ That music\u2019s lost its taste so try another flavour — antmusic.\u201d It\u2019s an infectiously crafted pop song with \u2018hit\u2019 written all over it and, unsurprisingly, it climbed to the number 2 spot on the Other standout tracks on the album are the tongue-in-cheek \u201cLos Rancheros\u201d (a song that pays homage to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone), \u201cKiller In The Home,\u201d \u201cMagnificent Five\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Be Square (Be There).\u201d The album\u2019s title track is another strong song, appearing at first to be about the fearsome warrior ethic of the Native American \u201cRedskins\u201d but in reality turning out to be nothing more than yet another discourse on the band\u2019s pride in its appearance and music. Are you spotting a theme here yet? <\/p>\n While it certainly demonstrates an unshakable confidence in their music, the self-obsessed nature of many of the band\u2019s songs is also a touch myopic and lends the album a rather shallow, self-centred feel.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Kings Of The Wild Frontier<\/i> is a strong album from a band at the peak of its form. It\u2019s a record that is decidedly hard to pigeonhole too, being not quite a new wave record or an excursion into 80s pop, but something strangely straddling the two that\u2019s probably best described as Antmusic. <\/p>\n With the distinctive drum-heavy sound, unorthodox backing vocals and catchy, hook-laden songs, Adam And The Ants succeeds in creating something genuinely original sounding on this album, and there\u2019s not too many bands you can say that about. Not a bad way to start a lifelong love of music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":29129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8111],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-40650","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-adam-and-the-ants","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40650"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}