Bruce Palmer
The Cycle is Complete

LA RECENSIONE

If you search on YouTube for some footage of Buffalo Springfield, the figures of Stephen Stills and Neil Young immediately stand out: always in the spotlight is the swaggering and charismatic Texan, while the grumpy bear from Ontario is almost always in the shadows crafting nervous and intricate riffs, equally crucial, however, to the band's dynamics. Often appearing is a man sitting on the amplifier, playing the bass with his back turned, both to avoid being recognized by Immigration Office officials (he was Canadian like Young, but had visa problems), and because his chemical habits were starting to get him in trouble with narcotics: that man was Bruce Palmer, bassist of the legendary Californian band.
In that band, Palmer was a luxury wingman: an eclectic and powerful weaver of pulsating rhythmic scans, never involved on a compositional level, and a departuree a few months before the companions disbanded. After a couple of years of artistic wandering, Palmer secured a contract to release his solo debut. "The Cycle is Complete" still sounds today like one of the most alien things ever released by a musician of "rock" extraction, obviously ignored by both the public and critics (with the notable exception of Lester Bangs), and the Canadian musician drifted into an oblivion that lasted until his death a few years ago, interrupted just by the collaboration with his friend Neil in the equally crazy (but decidedly less brilliant) "Trans". 

Joined by musicians from the Kaleidoscope circle, Palmer ventured with "The Cycle is Complete" into the depths of a wild jam session of a couple of hours, from which he extracted 34 minutes of terrifying psychedelic contortions, removed from jazz, folk, and blues. More than traditional rock tools, instruments such as oboes, flutes, violins, congas, and organs dominate, alternating seamlessly in a blinding creative and executive sarabanda, studded with shamanic visions of unspeakable depth. A pagan rite of primordial America beyond psychedelia itself, where consciousness explodes into a gallop full of vertigo and liberating catharsis. A process of emancipation that starts by slicing through the tropical fever, madness, and unhealthy atmospheres depicted by the violins and congas of "Alpha-Omega-Apocalypse", passing through the crazy shards of R&B of "Oxo", and then culminating in the splendor of "The Calm Before the Storm". Nine masterful minutes, where Bruce's Fender bass supports the structure: the entrance into the darkness of the storm is represented as a metaphor for the abysses of earthly life, where man's identity is dissected through his shadow, like in a Chinese shadow play. The music brushes the shores of perfection and silence, with its dissolves and hyperkinetic convulsions, providing us the cinematic ability to move through space and time, and to forge within ourselves the sense of life. Once its mission is complete, and reaching what Conrad defined as "the farthest point of navigation", the cycle can truly be said to be complete.