Social Distortion
Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes

THE REVIEW

While at the start of the new year most of my peers were excited about the release of the new Verdena album, I was thrilled about a completely different type of release.

Seven years after “Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’roll,” the seventh work (coincidence?) by Social Distortion comes out, and it forcefully inserts itself into a profoundly changed musical context, with the aim of bringing listeners back to the glory days of an America (perhaps) completely unknown to the very young and practically buried in the memory of the older, now accustomed to all sorts of experiments, indie rock, and similar genres.

Forged by thirty years of Californian punk-rock experience, Mike Ness and company return with a pleasantly refreshed lineup thanks to the permanent addition of bassist David Hidalgo Jr. (son of the frontman of Los Lobos), softening their Los Angeles outsider persona to embrace rock'n'roll in its most classic form. “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes” feels like a journey through the America of biker boots, flannel shirts, and cowboy hats: all stereotypes that have, sooner or later, teased the imagination of every rocker who considers themselves as such, providing the backdrop to that “Easy Rider,” “Motorpsycho,” or whatever kind of life we all would have liked to live, made of endless deserts and road trips to the rhythm of blues, for which this album would be the perfect soundtrack. An instrumental punch opens the track (“Road Zombie”), immediately transporting us to the heart of Orange County, surrounded by a boogie-blues that vaguely reminds of the intro to “It’s A Long Way To The Top” by AC/DC, this time sprinkled with a fair dose of pushy female choirs, especially at the close of the piece: on down the line, “California (Hustle and Flow” leads to a series of nine tracks that perfectly embody the spirit of the band. “Alone and Foresaken,” a cover of a Honky Tonk Williams song, seems like a revisitation of a piece from a few years earlier (“Like an Outlaw,” from the album “Prison Bound”), though viewed by the most skeptical as an attempt to retrace frontman Mike Ness's musical affections, being no stranger to such experiments (“Under the Influences,” his second solo album, is practically a covers album, nor can one fail to mention the version of “Ring of Fire” or “Death or Glory,” later included in the soundtrack of “Lords of Dogtown”).

The rest is an immense Kerouac-style trip, at times nostalgic and melancholic (“Bakersfield”), at times even Springsteen-like (“Diamonds in The Rough” seems taken from “Born To Run”), as if it were a tale of love and working-class USA, and at this point, I don't feel the need to say anything more. Thumbs up.