John Zorn
Naked City

Zorn has been telling us from the start: "watch out guys, Yamatsuka is coming soon, watch out"...

Indeed, with hindsight, those classic pieces at the beginning, if you really listened closely, were tainted with moments of jittery noises that would later reveal themselves as the backbone of the album with those eight "watercolors" of less than thirty seconds that twist your guts after you fell into the trap of worshiping it, thinking you had "understood" the reinterpreted covers and the free jazz that you had intellectually categorized into your certainties.

But then Eye (always Yamatsuka, yes) "a manna from heaven" disintegrates the cerumen of the classist vanities you had built and kicks your ass with a revelation of the "Word" that you never even imagined could exist. Take that!

The album is unsettling, an unbelievable punch in the balls for how logical this work is. There's unheard-of violence, but detached, you can feel violence but it's not there, you can sense the western but it's not there, you can feel the "music" but it's not there. At the striking of 007, there's a chubby catharsis that makes you want to grab a Roman-style sandwich with porchetta.

After the "Spanish cries" of the almond-shaped eyes outside the pyramid, I don't think there's going to be a need for any more wake-up calls for anyone, and it transitions to underground shores filtered by nostalgic, alien déjà vu tastes that, after the Japanese dusting, are necessarily revised by our conscience, willingly or not, where in the last pieces, I would dare to say, there is no style but playing eternity.

John does us the favor of making us understand the extent of our masochism, because at the end of listening there's a mad desire to put this garbage back on, suspecting that there's a concrete lesson in divine mystification, a "noisy" invisibility that doesn’t cast pearls to swine. Whatever anyone may say, the album is brilliant and fun, try it to believe it.

And on one fact there's no doubt, evolution necessarily passes through unacceptable screeches at maximum volume, period. Let’s make peace with that, my dear fans...