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Rating: A few new albums are piling up on my shelf: Springsteen, System of a Down, Van Der Graaf Generator... except for the Armenians, one might say I'm aging prematurely, but that's not the case. Instead, I live naively unaffected by the general disinterest in music and its carriers, feeling a sense of revulsion the moment someone forgets a pirated copy or a master of the latest pop artist in vogue, without the case, as if one could play skeet shooting with today's sonic format, right? It's not a matter of nostalgia, or at least not only.
For days now, an album that marked my life has been playing in the reader, amidst full Duranian delirium, when certain proof of the subsequent void at least evoked the playful pleasure of feeling, ahem, alternative. I find this cover again, the man who listens with dignity to the rustling of the trees, and mimics with his music the possibility that the world - after the new wave reverberations - stops quietly to listen. To think it comes from the somewhat aesthete experience of Japan, whom I have never raved about...
The ancient ghosts of the past blend with the serenity of "Pulling Punches", and it's almost irritating - with its restrained energy, though beautiful - compared to the rest. A very delicate "The Ink In The Well" leads me into the Eden that the West has since failed to find: brush strokes, like those of Picasso, abstract forms that ultimately bring man only to the primordial trace of his knowledge. Ultimately, it's all relatively simple, no matter how distant it seems from everything we see. Sublime decadence, not a downfall, like "Weathered Wall", where the darkness of the night leads man to the end of contemplation and to the purity of thought. "Brilliant Trees" I still find seraphic and serene, dazzling like the rays of the sun filtering through the trees in the late afternoon, before sunset, and Sylvian is there, almost a mantra-like hermit, inviting us to reach this dimension.
"Nostalgia" is one of those songs that seem to last forever, an infinite reverberation of an indivisible emotion, poignant and even "painful" when the melody enriched by Steve Nye's piano seems to take your hand and invade your mind: yet it's a positive energy, assuredly not the tiredly academic new age that produces this never-sated effect: you'd listen to it continually and let it carry you away, far away. From here, a beach in Veneto is quite different from a Japanese exile, notwithstanding the presence of former Japan members Barbieri and Jansen, or Sakamoto - a year after the splendid "Forbidden Colours" again with Sylvian, Mark Isham, and the omnipresent Czukay, but it's as if I find myself in different places at the same time. Pure communication, making the snobbish hermeticism of his recent "Blemish" even more elusive to me.
And the concluding title track is the epilogue of a surprisingly rich narrative, almost austere yet never bleakly contemplative.
This album still holds a place in my heart, which illuminated my season at 16 years old many years ago - 1984, to be precise - despite those friends who flaunted emotions perhaps already caught up by the present's magma, and indeed preferred "Pulling Punches" as the more or less catchy pathway of their measure.
I still see myself in it: and over twenty years later, I think that from the decadent aesthetics of Japan, above all a free spirit was born and reborn.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Pulling Punches (05:03)
If heaven watches over me
Sowing seeds back in the soil
With eyes that see, hands that feel
Why am I the last to know
Sheltered lives spent partially breathing
Are gathered together under new religion
Pulling punches, sleeping on our feet
Pulling punches, I needed someone to comfort me
Raised in summer days of splendour
Who would've dreamed of love never ending?
A better world lies in front of me
A sketch of life in the books I read
Then as I walk where heaven leads
Why am I the last to know?
Simple lives spent partially breathing
Are gathered together under new religion
Pulling punches, sleeping on our feet
Pulling punches, I needed someone to comfort me
Raised in summer days of splendour
Who would've dreamed of love never ending?
Nature feeds this nausea
Deep inside the heart of me
02 The Ink in the Well (04:32)
The lights of the ashes smoulder through hills and vales
Nostalgia burns in the hearts of the strongest
Picasso is painting the ships in the harbour
The wind and sails
These are years with a genius for living
The rope is cut, the rabbit is loose
(Fire at will in this open season)
The blood of a poet, the ink in the well
(It's all written down in this age of reason)
The animals run through harvested fields of fire
The bitterness shown on the face of the homeless
Picasso is painting the flames from the houses
The sudden rain
These are years with a genius for living
The rope has been cut, the rabbit is loose
(Fire at will in this open season)
The blood of a poet, the ink in the well
(It's all written down in this age of reason)
Fire at will
03 Nostalgia (05:43)
Voices heard in fields of green
Their joy their calm and luxury
Are lost within the wanderings of my mind
I'm cutting branches from the trees
Shaped by years of memories
To exorcise their ghosts from inside of me
The sound of waves in a pool of water
I'm drowning in my nostalgia
06 Backwaters (04:52)
Once again I'm hiding in backwaters
Running this way and that
Trying so very hard to please
(Beware of hidden snares)
Rushing to bite the hand that feeds me
Running this way and that
(There are always other possibilities)
This way and that
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