Dave Navarro: Trust No One : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This authoritative debut from the former Jane's Addiction and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist is not the kind of album where a tuneless guitar technician runs wild with the soloing. Instead, Navarro unveils a passionately consistent sense of how to fashion rage rock that's not for children. On Middle Eastern-tinted songs like the searing "Rexall" and "Not for Nothing," guitar rhythms race along with a marchlike intensity, as if they emanate from knottily emotional personal experiences. Yet Navarro, who smoothly croons as though he's been singing his whole career, expresses them with a symphonic command of serrated guitar and grooving acoustic drum sounds, everything silkily contoured by DJ-world computer rhythms. It is the work of someone who could be pegged as a session musician or a rock fashion victim, but when Navarro, on "Sunny Day," fears that "I don't know if I can hear another tale/Of how amazing you can be," you sense that there's something more at stake than an overdub or a photo shoot.

JAMES HUNTER
(RS 872 - July 5, 2001)