Magic Hour
Will They Turn You on or Will They Turn on You

LA RECENSIONE

In the microphone, the lull of 500 distant galaxies pulses in unison.

It's harmonious like a trembling chorus of cicadas, steeped as it is in the syrupy patina of the sirocco that blows in summer nights.

The song is out there, it is the cold sky that contains everything, it is the cosmos that envelops the world.

The spleen is vomited in a single whisper, a subdued murmur, inaudible like the rustle of two celestial bodies caressing each other, savoring a possible collision.

A name: Wayne Rogers.

The guitar is inside, the impulse, the blazing fire that moves the gestures of the planet.

The amplifier is the thundering mountain profile that spews fire. Thus it traces the bridge between the external coolness, the unlimited and frigid cosmos of the song, and the incessant internal ardor that vibrates on the strings like a kiss.

Same name: Wayne Rogers. One of the most brilliant guitarists of the past century. Horribly forgotten.

Amid the sighs, his solos, twisted and distorted, flow like tears, slow and incandescent, filling the empty furrows of lost reminiscences.

The guitar oscillates, and its bending is gentle like the unstoppable flows of subconscious magma; its gleam, the last shimmering tremor of a dying star at the time of its last sunset.

The singer's nocturnal whisper finally joins the cyclopean lung of the amplifier, which rhythmically contracts, in focus and out of focus: it is the volcanic mountain upside down, floating amid the mists of time.

Once it too was fire, and it certainly hasn't forgotten. Now it is the scrupulous guardian of it. The filaments of its roots, entwined in the sky, are membranous and slender hands stretched out to grab the light puffs of clouds: they flow undisturbed, unaware of so much frantic desiring.

The peaks up there float amid the motionless mists of time, plowing through the water mirrors down here, like the fingers of a child lazily dipped from the top of a moving boat.

Like graceful swans, they zigzag thoughtfully, brushing the marine universe without guessing the changing wonders that float silently beneath its surface.

Under its hands, enormous humpback whales swell and deflate, and they too exhale, but in spurts, sadness: they drink it and then spit it out, never ceasing to crave more…

…Cyclically, the rumble flares up, and the eruption intensifies in a cosmic raga, while Damon's drum kit (ex-Galaxie 500) quickly flips through the notes. And it is then that the pyramid explodes in the boiling jets of "Passing Words": the guitar derails crazily… and, while it swerves, its thousand tongues of lava rush up the switchbacks of trees in a mad race, until they encounter the frost of the celestial ocean. In contact with the cold, the flame sizzles, and its sound turns into a painful lament, a sinuous gurgle of an Indian sitar.

Reluctantly, Wayne holds individual notes for long moments; then, gasping, each string of the instrument explodes in powerful electric shocks. They probe the cold outside while a thousand love stories pulse beneath its crust of fire, destined to keep their secret silent. The stone and metal coagulate like blood, seeking the form in which to solidify and remain eternally still and mute.

The guitar is now a dying animal. Naomi Yang's bass (also ex-Galaxie 500) swells and quiets like a sail stretched by the wind; the guitar squawks, then collapses in a cacophonous tail.

It is the end and it is the beginning.