Glo-Worm
Glimmer

From my window, I see the sea. First, a stretch of fine sand, and then the sea. I see a vegetable garden of a few hundred square meters and an old woman deciding that it will rain on those tomatoes today. I see Agnese, more beautiful than ever, going towards this farmer and then coming back with a fistful of basil and winter on her lips. But winter is still far away. The food chain workers in the hot season have just signed an armistice, and I feel fine. Depersonalized.

The sunset is about to engulf a typically Mediterranean empyrean, and the hills turn their backs. Someone suggests that tomorrow will be the same, and I, carelessly looking towards the path, don't know who it is. It doesn't matter. They're right.

From my window, I can discern the notes of a saxophone. Probably Coltrane's saxophone on his "My Favourite Things". Meanwhile, Agnese is a butterfly dressed in white petals who barefoot crosses my horizon again on the sand. It's disarming. Not even twenty years old, a serene, fairy-tale face, and the eyes of someone who has seen quite a lot already, too much.

She knows. I'm crazy about her. And deep down, she's crazy about me too. Yet Agnese is afraid, and I haven't been twenty for too long according to her. Sure, I'm less than three hundred, but for Agnese, even five years would be an eternity. And I don't blame her. And I don't blame her because until some time ago, five years really were an eternity for her. Maybe more. So I wait for her. Until time, with legs on its shoulders, starts to gush out even from her little hands like beating drums.

But what I see from my window is a scene that no longer belongs to me. A life that I don't live, except as a spectator. And if Agnese were really still out there under these conditions, in addition to having a motive confirming the state of things and thus a valid reason to acknowledge my insanity, probably these thoughts wouldn't exist. Agnese herself wouldn't exist, and neither would I.

I'm at my window. Behind me plays a record, a Glo-Worm record that a woman gave me a long time ago. And the Glo-Worm, in the end, are just Pam Berry.

Pam Berry is an institution. Someone who has played in at least a dozen bands. Someone who actively participated, lending at least her voice, to the drafting of several good quality albums. The voice of the legendary Black Tambourine, and of the Bright Coloured Lights after them. Leader of the Shapiros and the Pines, "collaborator" of Veronika Lake, and so on. In short, a prolific cornerstone for what people vulgarly, myself included, call indie pop.
But when you get your hands on an album like "Glimmer" (K Records, 1996), you immediately realize it's not just pop. Berry's voice can bring the sun back on a rainy day, just as with the Black Tambourine's "Black Car", it could command that cold rain of melancholy necessary on a meteorologically splendid day, which could in fact quite calmly be a crappy day.

It's a collection of fourteen tracks that narrate the project's feats over the years. And, despite this, no specific (or otherwise) declines in substance are perceptible, neither in audio quality nor in purely compositional terms.
A perfect execution of seemingly simple tracks, but rich in nuances and humanizations. It's undeniable: when you listen to this stuff, it seems as if a nearly tangible entity appears before you, which can be a vivid memory or an imaginary window filling a room that has become unbearably too icy with warmth and colors, regardless of whether it’s forty degrees or not outside. A kind of door that opens to a parallel universe.

Mainly, the voice-guitar duo stands out or is at least prominent, but incursions from the rest of the rhythm section, keyboards that sound like xylophones, strings, etc., are not (at all) rare.
Certainly noteworthy is the handful of successful covers: from "Friday I'm in Love", passing through the unforgettable sixties hit "Downtown", and "Crazy Town", which seems to be a homage to Velocity Girl who in their words pay homage to Black Tambourine.

Luckily, I paid for this record out of my own pocket, and, after all, from my window, I’ve never seen anything but piles of concrete constructions and stacks of crap in plain clothes.