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Rating: Eleven stories tied by a leitmotif: the intellectual and emotional fragility of modern man, or "flexible," deprived of thought by technology (If I Were the Future), by rampant misinformation (Italy Doesn't Read, Metroregion), or resigned to being a solitary extra in a bleak social and political scene (The Swamp, Crime Is No More, The Flexible Man):
"I dominate because I move fast,
I am fluid, elusive, disengaged.
Perhaps I'm a bit more cunning than intelligent;
in short, I am a modern man.
But so modern that I am convinced
society doesn't even exist!
And if it does... I don't care"
(opening lines of the song "The Flexible Man")
"I had an old analog thought
and it often made me feel bad
but it seemed too heavy to me
for the new digital age"
(If I Were the Future)
And even the place of love, for Fava, is always tinged with chiaroscuro, where the sentimental and sensual momentum is mitigated by the nostalgic narration of lived and regretted loves. These are the moments when he gifts us with scenes of intense poetry, like when conversing with the girl just met in the bar, he thinks "of the distance between your address and my heart, between your home and love" (Black Cloud), or when he fixes a memory "in the room of dreams, under the
Chaplin painting, among the smiles of your freedom" (Under the Chaplin Painting, which perhaps deviates from the concept, except for the metropolitan dimension and the contemporaneity of the images: "Milan is still under my eyes and you nervously traveling by train").
The nostalgia sung by Carlo Fava permeates various songs on the album; in "Tender Is the Night" it assumes various adjectives: magical, physical, methodical, bestial, glacial, polemical, mystical, vulgar, rhetorical, historical... it's nostalgia for the True Man, still "inflexible" in his humanity, capable of reflecting and loving.
Carlo Fava participated in the Sanremo Festival in 1993, finishing second to last. I don't know what he has done in these long twelve years. I read that he has had an intense theatrical activity (his way of presenting songs fits into the style called "theater-song" that saw Gaber and Jannacci as its top exponents), that he wrote a song for Ornella Vanoni and one for Mina. I don't think it was easy for him to face these years of discographic silence and perhaps this is the meaning of "Trunks and Tailgates," a musical joke about the difficulty of life "as an artist."
He deserves an award just for his tenacity, for not giving up in the face of the difficulties of the cultural industry, receiving excellent reviews from the press and a satisfying public success (also thanks to good promotion: the show "The Flexible Man" has had dozens of performances all over Italy). They tried to promote him at the Sanremo Festival in 2006. But what was he doing there?
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