Massimo Giangrande
Apnea

THE REVIEW

There are certain albums that must be recommended. For one reason or another, they haven't received much attention. "Apnea is one of these."

Massimo Giangrande is a refined singer-songwriter from Rome, already a producer for Lara Martelli and an elegant guitar in the live performances of Roberto Angelini. He marks his recording debut with an album of high caliber, rarely found in recent Italian and other productions.

Eleven tracks that, though each has its solid autonomy, manage to create a rarefied sensation, light and melancholic only if listened to carefully, one after the other. The album's entirety, never more than this time, is crucial to better enhance its beauty.

Late autumn: it's early morning. There's a lot of fog that acts as your companion. On the road, many leaves crunch under the sound of your footsteps, you look up and find an empty sign. You turn back, smile, and melancholically resume your path.
All this is "Apnea". A solitary journey. One of those albums that require attentive and solitary listeners, the kind we might greatly need today.

"Thought is an ocean beyond the banks" is somewhat the manifesto phrase of the album. In it, you find the strong echo of nature in the lyrics, the love for the rarefied, the almost exasperated desire not to touch anything related to the concrete, instead leaving every minimal message in the air.

The delicate acoustic guitars paint the tracks with a soft yellow, reminiscent of the first rays of sun; Rodrigo d'Erasmo's violin embellishes tracks like "Nuvole" or "Il perché delle cose" (the first being very Drake-like in music, mainly due to d'Erasmo's touch); Angelini's guitar in "Fiore Rosso" takes us directly back to a great passion of his: the Radiohead.

Another singer-songwriter from Rome, and a great friend of Giangrande, Pino Marino, also collaborates on the lyrics and is a valuable co-author of "La teoria del volo" and "Come il cuore leggiero".

Let's seek our Apnea from the world, we'll take this little jewel with us and let every object or concrete thing drop away. It won’t be so easy to return to reality.