BY PAUL EVANS

With the Blitz/New Romantic/ Post-Punk movement receiving heavy press and even a feature in Rolling Stone (whose dull antennae are seldom · quick to catch the Next Big Thing), it’s time to look more closely at the new music from England. In the cyclical movement of life and art, punk/new wave’s stubborn style and concerns with politics, aggression and rebellion (with or without cause) were bound to be tempered in time. Hard punk, with its’ inevitable thrust toward nihilism, had its biggest bang with the Sex Pistols, then splintered - dance bands (The B-52’s); political agitators (Clash, Gang of Four); rhythmic explorers and pancultural synthesists (Talking Heads); new poets for new directions (Elvis Costello). Music and message became more diverse, yet an identification with underdogs, an emphasis on emotion over technique, a heat, a toughness were held in common.

Post-Punk, while dialectically incorporating this vigor and distrust of mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, has other interests - fashion, escape, a somewhat problematic heroism, an obsession with facades and, conversely, a brooding examination of highly individual fear/neuroses. Where punk was music for the streets, the new sound seems music either for the ballroom, the parade ground or the House of Usher.

Adam and the Ants, one of the cheerier of the new bands, makes up naive, fractured pop from the playchest of boyhood dreamland and Saturday matinee. Their sagas or “sagettes” draw on film scores (Lawrence of Arabia, Hugo Montenegro’s spaghetti Western themes), sea chanteys, Injun war whoops and English football chants. Geared up like Geronimo in Blackbeard drag, the visual style is Noble Savage meets Wildean Dandy meets Young Dude. Rather than a serious attempt at assimilation of message and image of exotic culture or myth, the Ants continue a very English preoccupation with magic lands and periods (Richard Burton/ Charles Doughty/Kipling). As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado was more pre-camp Orientalism than solemnly Eastern, Adam’s Apache fetish is more costume than cause.

Their obvious rock ‘n’ roll antecedent is glitter rock, specifically its mainman, Marc Bolan. In 1981 England, Antmusic seems much akin to 1972’s T. Rextasy in teen acclaim and critical abuse, and though Adam doesn’t match Bolan in wit or Pre-Raphaelite odd charm, his music seems fated for the same rocky reception Statewise - both popsters seeming a little too Englishly clever/cute for Yankee tastes. Though the Ants’ catchy, if obvious, war cry is “Antmusic for Sexpeople,” their realm is more a kind of J.M. Barrie limbo where boys don’t grow up. Adam’s voice, similar to Ray Davies at his coyest or Ziggy’s Judy Garland (in)sincerity, cries out from a wilderness where fancy reigns but little grows. Though the Ants share a same distaste for the banalities of nine-to-five existence, the self-admitted New Romantics attempt to spangle the post-Punk gloom with a glossier, more determinedly modern flourish. Visage (pronounce the word as if you were Marcel Proust sharing tea with Huysmaris: “Vih-sodge”) is Steve Strange’s band- he the founder of the. Blitz club where even Jagger isn’t Moderne enough to pass muster.

Bowiephile S. Strange has built an aural haberdashery of Roxy Music eight - years later - elegant, proficient, eyebrow-lifted sublimated heat. But where Brian Ferry played Bogart/ Romeo, alternately swooning then toughing out the loss of big love while wearing irony’s smart tuxedo, Strange falls headlong and somewhat breathlessly in love with the mirror. Their narcissistically named credo-song finds Steve rapturizing a chorus of “O, my visage, O, my visage” and listing an expensive catalog (“visuals! magazines!”) of accoutrements necessary for the follower of fashion.

While the lyrics go on about the importance of being newest and invite dream visits to romantic locales - “Malpasa Man,” “Moon Over Moscow” (Basso chanting a Ia “Boris Gudonov”) - the musical “packaging,” as befits a style that puts senses over sense, is consistently well designed for startling effect and constant novelty. Touches of Kraftwerk’s strangely sweet synthesizers and percussive deftness unite in a sound that’s visually inspiring - possible soundtracks for the deeply patinaed works of Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango). Fellow New Romantics Duran Duran mine the same musical, thematic lode a little more tunefully with a little less-obvious panache.

Tom Wolfe, who coined the term “Me Decade” for the 70s, thinks the ‘80s will be “purple” with a new concern for class, style and image. In the New Romantics, he’s found his music – self-aware dandies cultivating a new mannerism, ushering in the new Mauve Decade.

More extreme is the Blitzkrieg from and whose life/art was constructed as an altar to himself. Expectedly, Spandau Ballet’s music is a mix of mawkishness and melodrama; martial rhythms softened by coloratura mandolins. Equally expectedly, these Giovenezza without guns are more concerned with pose than politics and their “statement’’ is more fete than threat.

If the New Romantics’ stagey style in the service of restricted substance creates a kind of tension, other bands unify medium and message in one dark vision to give us a stark, impacted beauty that’s more Neo-Gothic. The eccentrically named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are two musicians who, like a more somber Yellow Magic Orchestra, a bleaker Kraftwerk, a more cerebral Pink Floyd, construct an ethereal alternate cosmos. This quasilunar landscape seems chilly and embattled, peopled by “Bunker Soldiers” and lost scientists “Pretending to See the Future.” At their most effective (“Almost,” “Mystereality”), the songs have a stately Albinoni-like solemnity that suggests Eno without the hope of Another Green World. Rarefied, poignant, severe.

Gloom and grandeur deepen in the music of Joy Division whose relative lack of commercial “success and disproportionate critical influence recalls the (musically dissimilar) New York Dolls or Velvet Underground. Unknown Pleasures, the group’s first LP, is a cold punkoid examination of angst and isolation. An “Interzone” “Where New Dawn Fades” and an anxious pressurized voice stating with flat finality,”! Remember Nothing.” Closer, their next (and last) album, finds them further entrenched in an airless place but the music - weighty, thickly-textured, slower - weds theme and treatment in an expressive seamlessness that appears to draw power from the same wounded source as the paintings of Edvard Munch or Francis Bacon, Celine’s bleak writing or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag accounts. Singer Ian Curtis, in a voice akin to Jim Morrison’s in baritone threat and grace, intones, “This is the way, come inside” and we enter a heart of darkness - the “Atrocity Exhibit,” ‘‘The Eternal.”

Though both the Doors’ and Lou Reed’s songs are clear antecedents, Morrison’s journeys to the end of the night were as celebratory as they were dark and Reed entered the underworld armed equally with irony and affinity. There’s little distance or elevation in Curtis’ vision; his complete identification with disquiet is unrelievedly obsessive. Forging too close a link between art and artist is risky, but given the claustrophobic intensity of his music, Curtis’ suicide by hanging seems now more sad confirmation than surprise.

Before continuing as New Order, the Curtis-led band released one masterwork, a single, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Propulsive rhythm unites with a memorable and oddly lovely synthesizer line over Curtis singing, with both empathy and control, his most effectively sustained song about joys and regret.

Perhaps it is fated after punk’s incendiary improvidence, that this new music is inward-looking and often cold. From the Ants’ unreal wonderland to the New Romantics’ somewhat feckless acceptance of surface to Joy Division’s closet world, a new constriction seems apparent. However, with new control also comes new intensity, and the skill and strength with which these musicians explore new possibilities makes their work both challenging and compelling.