•
Rating: I had promised myself not to cry anymore. I don't keep promises to myself. I cried. I lost the opportunity of a lifetime. Or rather, a possible life, which turned out to be impossible. I filed away a love in the form of a swimsuit never washed and stored in a transparent plastic bag that still holds the white sand grains and what remains of the trails of that distant beach and sea smell. I wanted the plane I was about to travel on for countless hours to take off vertically and take me into orbit, to soar over that situation that had become so real it made me feel like vomiting. In Europe, I immediately felt the cold of the sun. A sense of rejection from childhood that also gave me a minimum sense of strength to walk. But I didn't feel like it. I spent hours sitting in the airport just after I returned. I wanted to fly, and I did it in a completely artificial way. Then I waited for it to end. And it ended. I woke up a worker and European without even understanding what I had done during my period of inertia, acute smoking, and nocturnal lycanthropy. I turned into a beast and locked myself in my Milanese cage made of four walls with a double bed next to a kitchenette. And suddenly, I was back in the system. An excellent reintegration, I must say. Luckily I didn't lack anything: a good job, new acquaintances, trips. Sticazzi. I lacked everything. Because if I lose love, the 80s rocker in me kills himself. Worse.
As an 80s rocker, love was snatched from me by contingencies and latencies. I cut my hair and never let it grow again. In fact, when I tried, I started to resemble the happy person I was, and to avoid remembering, I had to reconstruct myself new and different in the mirror. Even appearances play their part in the game of the couple. Namely, me and myself. So I, with short hair, don't hurt the me who had long hair. In those hours of total abandonment to the equitable sharing of a pure feeling. I often recalled a misstep I made as soon as I set foot back on the old continent during my layover in Paris. Taking off the iPod headphones made me feel the sub-zero sound of the metal of our parts. It was like unplugging the only wire that still connected me to the previous night. The most beautiful music I thought I had ever heard. She had introduced it to me. I was even more captivated. The last thing I knew directly from her was that she had left me that legacy to think about how everything was so cosmic and, in a sense, objective. To erase subjectivity. As if to say, we knew it, you and I. Now the stars know it. And if it comes to mind, trust the cosmic nature of this record.
There’s a magician behind this wonderful and astonishing release of 1992. His name is Jay Graydon, born in '49, composer, singer, guitarist, record producer, and arranger from Burbank, USA. Between the late '60s and '70s, Jay worked as a session musician for Barbara Streisand, Diana Ross, Jackson Five, Cheap Trick, Ray Charles, Cher, Joe Cocker, Marvin Gaye, among others. Another extraordinary figure with a career easily traceable on the web is Cliff Magness, certainly the other soul of this superband that brings West Coast AOR into space and leaves it there as a masterful form of music made by mankind.
There are those who make music by instinct, to pour their soul into it and convey their being to the world. And then there are those who make studio engineering music, because they know it all, because they have a lively and creative mind, ready to assemble and experiment. Planet 3 belongs to the latter group, yet they manage to infuse it with great passion.
The album in question represents a very refined form of hi-tech AOR that is pleasant to listen to, all-encompassing, in a certain sense objective. The comparisons I found on other sites with other bands are all apt (Def Leppard meets Chicago), but few have noticed that it's as if Planet 3 wanted to express the potential of an entire genre in absolute value in the mathematical sense. A perfectly successful operation. There are many electronic sounds that, overall, appear ethereal, vaporous, and limpid, more than what (hard to believe) could have been produced by the human hand. Voilà. As I write, it comes to my mind that the dualism on this album is between human hand and human mind, and the latter wins hands down. Music From The Planet is an all-brain album. Which implies study and calculations but also emotions. It's as if the grey matter was employed to its maximum possible performance to create illusory settings without any flaw in which to make humans comfortable. A sort of matrix code dressed in the best possible reality.
Today, I settle there when I have the relentless urge to cry for that reason. I often think about it, even though I have a life today. In parallel, I sometimes wonder where I would be right now if everything had gone as it should have. But it's just a thought. It knocks me down some days, but it also keeps me company. Like this album that, more than marking a human story, marked an era without many being aware of it.
P.S. – On the web, this album is considered by ordinary people (not journalists) as an absolute masterpiece. 99% of the public reviews I found (many) give it the highest possible ratings. Listen to it. You'll feel what I felt.
Tracklist
Loading comments slowly
