Max Navarro
Hard Times

Reviewing "Hard Times," the new album by Max Navarro, I've become even more convinced that the Italian-Canadian rocker is one of the most underrated and unjustly snubbed artists by the media today. The record is a perfect synthesis between committed music and catchy melodies, and represents a remarkable qualitative leap compared to the previous two works, which I also appreciated in the past.

From a sound perspective, it's a distinctly southern album with great riffs that immediately get stuck in your head, as in the case of "Out of Bounds," "Nothing’s Guaranteed," or the opening "You Can Rely On." The first single to hit the radio is "Cryin’," a melancholic rock ballad enriched by a catchy yet not trivial melody, and a pounding drum that keeps the tension of the piece high until the chorus explodes. However, the piece I liked the most is "Nothing’s Guaranteed": infectious and disruptive, it's the classic song that grabs you at the first listen and doesn't let go. The bass lines intersect with a perfect guitar arrangement creating an explosive mix. The same staggering tone of the verse seems to resonate with the song's theme, which expresses the total unpredictability of human existence.

From a lyrical perspective, we are dealing with a rather mature album: an inexorable farewell to youth and adolescent themes to follow a more committed vein that had already been glimpsed in the rock ballad "Torquemada," from the previous "No Belonging After Dark." Some verses in particular impressed me so much that I jotted them down in my notebook, such as those where Navarro ironically but also bitterly states: "It’s time to give yourself away / In this general sale situation / Money in exchange for feelings in the usual devious dealings" from "You Can Rely On," or again "What is good is not what’s good, but it’s what’s right / and I realized that what’s right is not what’s right but what people think is good" from "Beyond the Silence": a sardonic denunciation of the rampant hypocrisy, which has now become a founding value of this decaying society.

The album closes with "End of the Universe," a piece that contrasts with the rest of the album both sonically (getting much closer to a Springsteen style like "Lucky Town") and lyrically, being a song of hope, perhaps signifying that at the end of the tunnel of this economic and social crisis there is still a small glimmer of light for a better future.