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Rating: Those fades will not return.
When the volume of the singing decreases but the music does not.
A device one cannot help but adore, when an early 80s refrain, so reluctantly catchy, so softly flexible, crosses over to the other side of perceived reality, pulsing like the wrist of a hand frozen by snow, under an innocent and lost, imploring gaze. Of a simple girl. That hand wounded by frost might, perhaps, caress that fresh-faced visage.
Yes, fresh-faced, in a world of dirty Reaganian hedonism and colorful popsicles. But Nicoletta patiently tinkers with her old kerosene stove. "I am my beloved’s," she would like to whisper with a bigger voice. To feel her desire descend upon her. But that snowman, clumsy, carrot-haired, dithers. Like a giant sloth, of four tons. Unable, despite its loving mass, to move a single finger. «You sit next to me/ And behave like a saint».
«You’re just a snowman/ in skin but cold you are/ But I like you so much I'm going crazy/... /Snowman snowman the stove has gone out but inside you/ Your heart has now ignited/ And now you think only of me». Spores in germination covered by a snowy mantle. Winter insisting at the door… evening. More than ever, luminescent.
"Snowman" reminds me of "Lilly’s Magic Bon Bons." Reminds me of «At Zigo-Zago/ There was a magician/ With a blue face» by Daniela Goggi. Cartoonish, lanky, titillating but in a furtive way. An idealized leap towards an adult world. The yearning, eternally childlike, for «a kiss and something more». All in shades of turquoise, rosy, vacillating in varied possibilities.
And many years after 1983...
Disappearing in the epiphany of a 45 rpm record.
Disappearing in an orange record-eater.
Disappearing in stolidly meritocratic oblivion.
To hell with oblivion!
Give us back the thousand and one Nicoletta Terenziani.
«And what would I give to stay with you»?
To feel is to feel that fade.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
P.S.
Dedicated to mr. Bluesky, @[mrbluesky], who proposed this record in his series of small-great horrors. I wanted to mock this song. But upon properly listening to it, it was not possible. The passionate fire burning in this track’s little stove deserves respect. It evokes a bitter nostalgia. And it reminds me of the Penny record-eater.
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