Winger
In the Heart of the Young

THE REVIEW

Narcissistic rock, so perfectly proportioned to look up from above. In The Heart Of The Young is an album that can feast with the greatest works of the absolute music greats. Maybe I say this because it's my all-time favorite?  And yet, in the now twenty-year-old night that has fallen on 80/90s rock, some supernova continues to shine, and the one with the brightest effusions has astral coordinates perpendicular to me and is called Winger. I wish Kip knew that I consider him a point of reference and a magical artist. His solo works are diary pages that perfectly align with my reality. But this record (anno domini rockorum 1990) truly managed to tell the story of a society. Or, more than telling it, it managed to describe states of consciousness with music from which a psychologist could draw a group profile. The joyous, rowdy, golden, flamboyant, steel 1990 was the launch year of a generation that made a leap, falling into the void of oblivion. Not even Winger knew the world was about to change irreversibly, but they were the first to infuse anxiety and veiled unease into that rock that seemed to be reaching God while forgetting that stretched towards the sky, a earthly body would eventually be subject to gravity.

In The Heart Of The Young does not forget at all to be a part of a trend. But it wants to estrange from it, wants to keep it under and under slap. The technique and atmospheres are catchy and virile, and are put at the service of magic. Instrumental acrobatics and turns are brilliant and of exquisite intelligence. Every single drumbeat maintains this micro-universe in balance, made up of floating notes that hold together like stars coexist in the Milky Way. And if the drums already sound so indispensable for the perpetual motion of this music, try to imagine what happens with the other instruments.

There are no dreamlike atmospheres, it would be nonsense to say so. However, as I said before, there is the musical description of a society's reflections and its intermittent states of consciousness. Here, the album in question has the power to keep you wide-eyed while dreaming of dreaming. While you reflect alone in your room and see a love vanish or be born, emotionally and physically involving your thoughts, so much so that you move as you enact what you wish would happen. While you feel someone distant so immaterially close.

In the majestic display of unique compositional skills, Winger at times seems to touch, reaching from behind, the brink of nightmare. Much of the light that comes to the album seems reflected from that poetic unease of someone who shines so much but perceives that something is beginning to fade. Many of you will know the album and probably will disagree with me. I think of what Kip wrote later, I answer you in advance this way.

Our lucid visionaries propose a certified New York hard rock registered at the anagraph. There are plenty of songs to burn the advance sales of world arenas. I think of Easy Come, Easy Go and Can't Get Enough in particular, with riffs that would justify the feeling of envy from those who didn't write them. But there's a part of the album that could have been published on its own: the quartet lined up from Under One Condition, Miles Away, Rainbow In The Rose and The Day We'll Never See is really what should have been perceived at the time as the future of music and justifies everything I've written so far. A hard rock suspended in the air that rewrites AOR and tickles prog.

When I see the latest photos of Kip Winger playing the last album, Karma, in a very dismal room scattered in Greece in front of a flock of die-hard fans, I think that the hard work he's doing now is precisely what will deliver him to history. Having the humility to do a world tour today, without arenas but in small rock nooks to fill, honors an artist who had such foresight as to avoid falling into the artistic chasm and the grave mourning that struck him. Kip Winger and In The Heart Of The Young deserve a score that goes far beyond what one can give here.