"Steve's Hungarian Novel", Ozit/Psygressive LP
Wonders are still pouring from The Way We Live/Tractor's archives, after the publication, dating a few months ago, of the CD collection of unreleased tracks "Before, During and After The Dandelion Years, Through to Deeply Vale and Beyond", a luscious Ozit edition we duly told you about. "Steve's Hungarian Novel", a double vinyl published in co-operation with the Psygressive label, is an elegant work in a limited edition of 1000 copies, the first 200 of which are signed, whose programme slightly overlaps to the aforementioned CD but also with a different concept behind: this is not a philological collection of unreleased tracks, but rather a blend of old and new material (wherein songs older than 1971 prevail), in a sequence capable of working as a concept-album. This deed was probably not too difficult to achieve, given the coherence that has always supported the inspiration of Milne, Clayton & co. in sketching songs with an ever eclectic and unpredictable aspect, but whose musical solutions are never pretentious. The essential and effective hard pulse of "Call Him", form The Way We Live repertoire, thus introduces a carousel of throbbing emotion, roaming from the tender and gentle psychedelic ballad, to the Mind Garden-styled vaporous and hallucinated dreams (oh, that unforgettable "Now Is The Time..."), the late Zeppelin hard-soul excursion, the fresh and energetic epic-rock of "Jester". We will not miss, of course, the testimony of the more experimental and "noisy" side that Tractor have explored, in particular, during the first half of the Seventies, and that is exasperated with an ambient implication on the fourth side of the album: after the short, menacing "Sun Cycle", a quarter of an hour long of running water sounds ("The Stream") begins, an experiment of musique concrete made in 1998, an outcome of the attempt, as naпve as you want but overtly sincere, of reaching the "point where music is not defined, but simply exists - to last forever". Just as the legend of Tractor, indefinitely suspended between past and present, irreversibly inscribed in the history of English psychedelia...
Enrico Ramunni - Rockerilla Magazine, January 2000