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The matter is about sixty in the eighties, thanks to yet another rock bible...
That, if I, a devout psychedelic child, read about “a third ear for the crooked melodies capable of opening up at a certain point into celestial rifts, only to return immediately to the pace of a off-key nursery rhyme,” well, yes, I, just I, cannot help but set off on a journey.
And maybe, since I'm at it, I might as well borrow the strange means of transportation that you can admire on the wonderful cover. Something between Professor Balthazar's machine and Syd's bicycle.
Not only that, maybe because I'm reading Carson McCullers, but the aforementioned crooked harmonies make me think of the little girl Mick, the one who tried to make a violin from a broken ukulele…
And it is ideally an instrument like that to play the music I love the most. Even though, of course, there's no ukulele here, no violin.
Who knows, however, how that beautiful trembling organ was built, how much glue, how much tape...
...
“I laughingly told her “but Ms. Aquilone
don't you find your occupation a bit silly?”
And the occupation (and I add this for the very few uninformed) is flying in the wind...
Alice doesn't know and neither does Francesco, but Ms. Aquilone is a close friend of a certain nun. A slightly flying nun herself...
And sorry if I start like this, but it's indeed by flying that we begin here. And we fly, of course, in the kaleidoscopic sky...
Ah, these psychedelics always with their heads in the clouds!!!
…
Then there's a guy who says he's lost and thinks “who knows, maybe I ended up in that box.” So he takes the box, looks inside, but nothing, no trace of him.
Then, in a jolt of desperate common sense, he starts reasoning this way: “but after all, I am here and if I am here it shouldn’t be hard to find myself” and indeed he finds himself. Only that it's not him.
“I no longer want to be I,” said the poet from the night of times, unknowingly, I suppose, casting bait and hook for all future psychedelics. Even though, let it be said in passing, who ever wants to be I? Who?
Now all this is told in the guise of a village folky tune just barely spiced with a light psychic gas and is found on track eleven of this wonderful record/album which sends me pretty much over the moon.
The placement is to the right of the early Floyd (the really good ones) and to the left of the sixties-oriented XTC
The exact spot is where the instinct for flight and melancholy meet, exchanging a half-smile.
...
But now some preliminary information for the continuation of the story.
First of all, the brodo di giuggiole really exists and is not just a metaphor. The recipe was revealed to me in a dream by the flying nun_you take the jujubes and let them soak with sugar and brandy. That's it? That's it. Yes, okay, there is also a secret ingredient, but I can't tell you that. In any case, the purpose of this famous broth is to take the autumn melancholy and let it flutter in the air. It apparently works better than xanax.
Another thing: I am absolutely certain of the existence of New Zealand, I have, so to speak, the proof. In fact, a friend of mine, a few years ago, bestowed her favors on a brawny personal trainer from that mysterious area of the world. So do personal trainers exist too? Well, on this I won't commit myself, even though, like Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.”
Okay, I've beaten around the bush, but let's say these Chills, while seeming more English than afternoon tea, indeed come from New Zealand and the album under review was released in the early eighties for the worthy Flying Nun.
Being rather long I can't certainly unfold it all for you, but, for instance, track one is sweet and makeshift disorientation, track two something found and irretrievably lost, track three the classic carousel adrift, track four is “everything you want, but don't make me go home,” while five is sharp and rattling...
And so on, and so forth...
Nonetheless, expect all the sixties tricks, the ones I already mentioned and the ones I don't need to tell you. Add a hint of wave and the “bi ba bi ba bi bo” of one of the choruses present. And know that it is pop, the good kind, actually very good…
...
Ah, little girl Mick…
The little girl Mick always climbed onto the roof of the under-construction house with a broken and crooked ladder…
And it is with a ladder like that that certain melodies ascend to the heavens…
Trallallà...
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