The Flying Lizards
Fourth Wall

LA RECENSIONE

Opening the flying lizards' cookbook at random, here's what I found under ingredients: one-third something, one-third something else, one-third something else again. Interesting, I said to myself.

And so I opened it again: thus, instead of something and something else, came this and that, later replaced by who knows what on the very next page. Continuing the little game/experiment, I then found that the ingredients kept being different.

In short, a potpourri, a patchwork, a bit of everything. Not to mention that, staying with the cooking metaphor, what the lizards mix together seems, let's say, at least incompatible: salami and Nutella, let's say, or milk and mayonnaise. And yet no, their science of the unexpected, while always overdoing it, manages, somehow, to never really go overboard.

But now, just so you know how you might meet your end, here are some general coordinates. Take "Another Green World" and, to shuffle the cards, think of the wind. Then, imagine the old Brian Eno all shuffled too, by I don’t know what. At the end of the day, adding shuffle to shuffle, you get something similar to this "Fourth Wall",

And now, after the general coordinates, here's a nimble list of everything I recognized: skeletal white rhythms, sounds that arrive uninvited, half silly and half psychotic marches, dance tracks from a futuristic cartoon, sudden melancholies, interludes of celestial and relentless ambient (like Eno better than Eno).

All spiced with a little witchy wave voice and plentiful handfuls of childlike noise. What the elements (and sub-elements) of said noise are is quite a tricky problem. I recognized whistling kettles, plungers, music boxes, and coffee grinders. You'll probably recognize something else.

The deus ex machina, the big lizard, the alchemist, the magician of the project is an egghead with a curriculum a kilometer long: courses and recourses of deviant pop, a master's in cut and paste, musical juggling conventions, and more.

Perhaps, in the end, the result is a bit too so intellectual, so cool, so I've got it all to myself, as if to say "this is music, not your big guitars." But that's okay, and to be honest, I'm crazy about it, because there's plenty of genius, plenty of fun, and some melancholy here and there too. In short: it's a hell of a record.