Enrico Ruggeri
Il Falco e il Gabbiano

"Have you ever followed the flight of a hawk or a seagull
Bold trajectories in the wind against a distant sky?
That's how I am, I want to fly
When I say I will have you
I will have you"

These are the words that open a song, and perhaps a new era of one of the greatest (and perhaps slightly underrated) Italian authors. The romanticism with dramatic hues of the music that surrounds these words and the metaphor symbolically introduced as an emblem of the contrasts crossing life (hawk/seagull, reason/instinct, masculine/feminine, power/gentleness...) establishes the central theme around which the entire work unfolds. From a strictly musical point of view, in fact, the greatest novelty is an arrangement played out on contrasts transposed into the realm of sounds: the melody and narrative style recall immediately the "chansonnerie" of French (and Belgian: Jacques Brel won't be offended) tradition in which we are accustomed to recognizing E. Ruggeri, but the electronic arrangements, cold, the rhythmic scores (also alienating in their electronic automatism) that slowly and dramatically mark the passages of the song, highlighting precisely its more controversial inner aspects, give it background colors that allow me to attribute its identity to the concept of "existential rock". The same term that can be used for Joy Division and Nick Cave.
In other words, the past doesn't pass: the spectral presence of Decibel unexpectedly surfaces in what is (in my opinion) one of the gems (if not the best track) of this new collection. It plays out, moreover, on the fine line between bitter reflections on life (especially in emotional aspects: "Oggi Ritorno"), ironic reenactment of the game between the temporal planes of the nostalgic past (what stylistically makes Enrico Ruggeri "resemble" French singer-songwriters: "Cielo Nero"), and the almost "embarrassing" past as in "Punk (prima di te)": a past from which distance is indeed kept, and against which Ruggeri defines in an antithetical way his own stylistic identity, but which can also represent a sort of underground river that occasionally resurfaces. "Ti Avrò", in fact, perfectly recalls, updated to the latest sounds, what was anticipated by the Avant-Garde Punk realized in the distant past of the original band. And as in the best reunions with another (and darker) side of oneself, the result is exhilarating.
"Lo Sguardo Come il Mio", a sort of reconciliation with life that mends the dramatic contradiction between the two "personalities" or "narrative voices" symbolized by the images on the cover seems the most relaxed and (momentarily) reassuring conclusion.

A hard, tense album, dominated by a gloomy mood and by a response to a melancholy that surfaces despite attempts to free oneself from it, a response that sounds as biting as the howl of the wind sweeping the deserted beach depicted in the winter scenario. The winter of the soul? Probably the dominant season, for now, when it rains between the lines of the past depicted in this sad and reflective inner page, but not forever: the very high profile of Enrico Ruggeri's inspiration has (over the years) accustomed us to a view more "from above" of the internal meteorology of emotions. That, as is known to those who have the ability to make these "bold flights," is always, by its very nature, changeable.