Eugenio Finardi
Finardi

1981: the roaring seventies ended in (little) glory with the not-so-excellent 'Roccando Rollando', the national Eugenio realizes that times are changing and decides to reinvent himself. Unlike many of the angry ones, he doesn't calm down; on the contrary, he releases his hardest and angriest work, the lesser-known and self-titled album that is the subject of this review. On the cover, his face is transfigured into the image of an electric guitar, which is indeed the primary instrument of the record. What had been (rightly or wrongly) the most famous of our 'rock songwriters' (I know, it's a horrible definition) transforms into a 99% rocker, starting by abandoning the solitary writing of lyrics (a practice in which he had expressed himself almost always at decent but nothing more levels) and focuses on the musical and interpretative part producing a series of high-quality tracks. Collaborating on the lyrics is Valerio Negrini, the official lyricist of Pooh (don't laugh) who here vents all his anger for the amount of bullshit he had to write in his career.

The only song from the album that has survived is the syrupy (but well-made, let's be clear) 'Patrizia' which is also the only track that stands out. In all the others, both the sounds and the themes addressed are decidedly more striking. The album opens with the very aggressive 'Trappoole' which tells of nighttime mis/adventures of a young 'delinquent' and continues with 'Mayday' where the young protagonists "prepare for war / with a puff of powder" are nothing but "packs of young rats/ from the belly of the city / with faces made up as young wolves / hunt here and there". But the best is yet to come: the reggae of 'Valeria come stai' (with Lucio Dalla on wind instruments) is a sublime declaration of non/love (the lyrics would greatly please the Dente of Love isn't Beautiful) masterfully interpreted; the straightforward rock of 'F104' has banal but explicit lyrics against "those who/ come up/ more and more" for whom the airplane of the title and a nice precise machine-gun burst would be needed and 'Piccola Stupida', which revisits the themes of 'Valeria come stai' offering us a determined claim of freedom: "when you left me/ I thought I was screwed/ and instead now I'm great/ and you laughed and I cried/ and now I'm the one laughing!"

Closing the album are three pieces united by several common traits: 'Prima della Guerra' is the desolate cry of a survivor who remembers the technological marvels of the 'before' and the diptych 'Oltre gli anelli di Saturno' and 'Le stelle stanno ad aspettare' that invite (reversing the theme of the famous - and boring - Extraterrestrial) to flee into space, the new worlds, the stars that await us 'on the shores of a new sea'.

Because:

"My race

precise and reckless

with the right energy

can still be victorious.

We are only the satellite

the adolescent star

but the road of space

is a transparent net".

The best album by Finardi.