Part-Time
Virgo's Maze

Arianna had lost the thread. Not only that, she seemed to have also lost her mind. For a tall, strapping, and slightly rough guy. His name was Mino, with Calabrian ancestry coming from Gioia Tauro, yet of heraldic and noble lineage. It seems that on another strange evening, Mino's mother, Pasiphae, wife of Minos king of Crete, had herself slightly lost her head for a magnificent bull, even recommended by Jupiter himself. A beastly attraction at first sight.

In this restless night, with trembling street lamps and the regal gardens fully paved according to the ordinance protocol of the day, we are in 2047 and the water resources to refresh the vegetation are scarce. Instead, the green prosperity of the Server must be preserved and irrigated with water and mineral salts; for example, my new and fresh GPU goes crazy for Perrier.

In this labyrinth with no way out, a slim and thoughtful Theseus was pondering meekly on everything except being a hero, lazing on his Fifty Malaguti and with a bunch of roses for his beloved Ariadne, unaware of the new tense stories with the Calabrian Mino. Then those labyrinths made your head spin and lately, he had even developed a bit of annoying vertigo aside from the labyrinth. Along with a bit of fear of those stories of people entering and never coming out again, it's late, but we still wait a little longer for sweet Ariadne tonight. In the shy waiting, a discovery had emerged; Theseus had discovered this very strange artist, I think American, with a one-man band called Part Time. Right in front of the labyrinth's foyer, without a hint of entering, and sprawled on the Malaguti, he was enjoying listening to this album with his inseparable Walman, Virgo’s Maze, more dazed than usual to be honest. First observation: the work was not just listened to but even insinuated under the skin, twisted around thoughts, already quite distorted themselves, and awakened ghosts, images of a winning past in its analog tone and rubbery grease. More than a labyrinth, that carpet of notes tossed you to the edges of a Discoring, at the mercy of a strange big-nosed guy who posed you embarrassing and lewd questions, or interned on the Scramble spaceship at the first nerd level, the one where you have to mainly be careful not to crash into those beloved rocky promontories. A big psychoanalytic problem of the time was the inability to understand why with all the damn technology of a spaceship twisting and turning deep space, it could only shoot two rinky-dink bombs at a time, what chronic depression. And then the canisters marked Fuel, months and credit loans to understand they weren’t stray mines but canisters to hit to recover fuel and prevent that damn spacecraft from crashing.

Virgo’s Maze has no way out, it’s a nocturnal and pyrotechnic dance in the madness of the 80's, it’s perhaps preferable to be sprawled on the Malaguti rather than get hopelessly lost in that labyrinthine whirlpool.

One gets lost, one is found, one forgets. And when that record ends in the head after all those colors, only silence remains along with the burden of all those unanswered questions.

The band is indeed a one-man band, the project refers to the front-man David Loca, he is Californian, and Part Time is his monomaniacal musical vehicle.

Online there are unclear tidbits about his person, there’s something murky, perhaps a mischief, but who cares, here music reigns over the sprawled and oblivious reality. Indeed, the music has a strange essence of supervised freedom, we are in an autistic and Bedroom Pop aesthetic, the sky and dreams shattered in a room, domestic sounds, drum machines & Casio Keyboards. Like a traveler from a murky past, indeed on supervised release, with eyes hollowed by remorse and hands trembling with broken dreams. He walks the streets with the cadence of one who has seen too much and lived poorly, his words are phrases stolen from diaries forgotten in motels, his melodies are the sound of neon hissing between the cracks of existence. Virgo’s Maze is a mosaic of existential fragments and astounds with its scenic complexity. It’s the forbidden fruit of an artist exiled to the borders of a perhaps Venetian-style bedroom? Where every track is a call to a sweet déjà entendu, where the thin boundary of a track is a universe where Limahl, Morrissey, and Elvis Costello can coexist and thrive.

Perhaps because in the solitude of that bedroom the stories told are lived and suffered, consumed like a night owl dragging itself among the shadows and seeking something resembling redemption.

The opener Cost of Living advances on uncertain steps, like a wanderer who counts the stars above him. The bass seems to have been snatched from the hands of an astonished Simon Gallup and pulses with the same hypnotic rhythm as A Forest by The Cure, wrapped in an echo that seems to want to hide sins. The keyboard is instead Japan Gentleman Take Polaroid all life long as if there was no tomorrow; it’s crazy what a disturbing vision can materialize in the intimacy of a bedroom. I gather fragments and bits of the lyrics, actually no, I can’t find them, what a pity, I like the track, it’s hypnotic and obsessive enough.

The second track My James moves more freely, its melody recalls the urban melancholy of some trendy and nerd-romantic place carved in the past, with keyboards leaping from some Visage track, sparkling like illuminated shop windows under the rain. Touch Me Responsibly is brash in its Electro Pop haze and disorienting, confusing you in that already mentioned déjà entendu among echoes of China Crisis and the gentle synthpop with quiff of A Flock of Seagulls. It’s Elisabeth is Albion-branded pop fizzling with many allusions to The Pale Fountains and Aztec Camera. With Science Shadow & The Religion on the Wall & The Garvo 623 (one of the hippest tracks of the album) you board the dynamics of a space colony with Kraftwerk in piped music, I found the lyrics and savored them, but what a rogue this David Loca, The Garvo 623 is Gary Numan playing Kraftwerk aboard the Scramble.

Pussy of My Dreams is the hit of the underland, practically for those who chew Marvel, that weird and parallel universe to planet earth, here even Marc Bolan is exhumed and revitalized and the result is a track that wouldn’t be out of place in Electric Warrior.

I close with the dizzying lightness à la New Order of Strangest Eyes.

Theseus has fallen off the Malaguti.