The Way We Live
A Candle For Judith

There are many aspects to the night. Our senses perceive the world around us in a completely different way... The night. Everything is more rarefied and soft, sometimes blurred, so much so that it's hard to find a suitable soundtrack. Sometimes you succeed, and it feels like magic; other times, frustration builds like the fire that decides to explode from the earth's bowels through a volcano, and you can't find anything that fits your night perfectly, like a tailor-made suit crafted by the skilled hands of a tailor.

This is a good night... The hectic wandering of the day has left fine sands deposited at the bottom of my brain, which, from the sunlit Nevada desert, have hurled me into the padded depths of space, allowing me to relish the magical elongated notes of cities shrouded in darkness. This is exactly how I'm experiencing this night, the dilation of space-time immerses itself in the liquid notes of Milne's guitar and in Clayton's rhythms that accompany my wandering through deserted streets, inhabited only by my fantasies.

"Storm" seems to clash with its own title, as soft is the hard rock interwoven with the most delicate psychedelia, with the voice that seems to come from far away, just not to disturb too much. The eyes seem like heavy shutters that do not want to surrender to the approaching limit, where the butterfly, flirtatious day must clear the field, letting the depth emerge in "Willow", where the dazzling lights of hard rock become more serious and contemplative in their wandering through desolate, suffering lands... They seem to play cat and mouse "The Way We Live", it seems they want to warn all their contemporaries about the way they are living, trying to strip away that "glam" patina afflicting sacred monsters, for which they grind Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple into a perfect concentrate of schizoid hyper-blues, which comes straight from the depths of their being instead of the contorted path that thoughts have to make through the brain to come out... This is also "King Dick II".

The night, she's the protagonist, so the squares live on in pure melody in "Squares", a kind of reassuring urban vision of the restless countryside described by Nick Drake. The Middle Eastern neighborhood seems very silent from afar, it seems to sleep spiced dreams, but as soon as your steps bring you closer to it, the discreet yet pulsating frenzy of its warm soul envelops you and carries you on the flying carpet of "Siderial" to a Parisian café where a couple of languid chansonniers, wrapped in the smoke of endless cigarettes, entertain with "Madrigal" the last soldiers of the Reich who simply do not want to lift their Teutonic behinds from the comfortable cushions covering the sofas, weary from fatigue and drunk from the tasty fortified wine, almost harmless in their stripping off the executioner's uniform. We exit the place, and the road ahead is long and arduous in light of our return journey and the first glimmers of the day brazenly announce its imminent return, but this is our "The Way Ahead", which with amphetamines we speed up to avoid being surprised by the boisterous reemergence of the everyday "normality".

The first puff of the cigarette I light upon return upends my respiratory system and realigns the thoughts that had followed their insane scheme in disorder, and I find myself looking at the improbable faces of Milne and Clayton looking elsewhere from the back of the cover, elsewhere where they have always been and where they will be a year later as "Tractor", telling us other fantastic stories. Timidly, I find myself thanking them for this "A Candle For Judith" and thanking that great soul that allowed me to extract them from the oblivion in which they had been confined.

It is a good day, this, to go to sleep.