Gareth Williams & Mary Currie
Flaming Tunes

LA RECENSIONE

Galeotto was the esoteric manual, something like "underrated masterpieces."

Then the definition found while browsing the internet: "understated post-electronic type of lo-fi urban folk..."

Mouth-watering stuff...

The cover, with that worn-out gray of the photo (a wear that from afar looks like snow) and those rather peculiar faces, already says it all... and even the title is no joke.

And anyway, we are in the early eighties.

So here you go: Gareth Williams, who was in This Heat, and Mary, a mysterious maiden with a Mona Lisa smile.

Imagine: a melodic innocence wrapped in mist; something restrained and suspended; ice/fire ballads with limping and muted sounds.

And again: the ghost of childhood trapped in the playroom; the horrendous adult chill anchoring the real to the real...

Then bring together the most lunar Robert Wyatt, the most erratic Brian Eno, the wizard Moebius and Rodelius, the flying lizards of David Cunningham.

Add the essentiality of certain post-punk and a super fascinating hybrid of buffoonery and mysticism.

You'll then get an album that despite such references still has a unique flavor that in the end I can't quite convey, although I know it's yet another variant of that type of not-sad sadness that we bedraggled folks love so much.

Not only that, but a sort of wisdom is also unraveled. Here is an example: "my body looks forward, my restless mind runs back, like a banner fluttering in the breeze I must strive to hold on" (track seven)

And anyway, from which dark planet are these songs? Which diaphanous beings will dance to them? Which demons will tear them apart? Questions mercifully without answers...