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Rating: Italian songwriting needed an anti-diva. The case of Peppe Voltarelli is unique: a retro attire of a glamorous Calabrian emigrant, a face of indifferent, dazed, resigned Calabrian who lived among the disarming cement along the S.S. 106 Jonica, a disheveled worker look of a family man who has to feed five Calabrian children. And where do you send someone like that, someone who seems purposefully made to not appear anywhere. In Italy, of course, no one wants him, except for some unlucky unionist on May Day because he's cheap, or it's him begging for cramped spaces in the province of Campobasso, in his parts, in Bologna at some party for children of workers sodomized by communism. Just to say one thing, can you imagine that face at Sanremo? No, it just can't be.
Italy is good at talking to itself, it's good at creating the Morgan case, it's good at ignoring its best talents, it's good at telling its children not to leave while kicking them in the ass.
And so Peppe Voltarelli, a Calabrian from Mirto (Cs) - therefore someone to be feared - plays a really nasty trick on Italy. He decides to leave. And return. Leave. And return. Leave. And return. Not giving a damn about the various pippibaudi, paolibonolisi, antonelleclerice, and other corpses kept alive by mom RAI, he constructs a discourse from a Calabrian with balls, makes it known around and starts to gain success in Mexico, Argentina, United States, Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Czech Republic. While Italy in the hands of the itagliani is blind.
The past as the leader of Il parto delle nuvole pesanti does not need to be deepened on this site, just to say that that excellent musical and social experience made everyone understand that our man was a songwriter and that sooner or later he would set out on his own. Done and done not without suffering.
He has only one solo album, Distratto ma però, with a title that suits him just like a mustache suits him. This Buscaglione, all Tenco and all tango from that part of Italy that many (foolish) consider Africa, would be able to demonstrate to you with his music that "a straight line is called a curve." Music kneaded like the housewife with varicose veins, wrinkles, and white hair at 35, dressed in black from head to toe - in a word, Calabrian from the Habsburg imagination - would knead the desserts of poor Calabrian cuisine. Music as salty and clear as the Ionian Sea shared by Voltarelli's land with Greece and Albania. Italian music, the one truly to be supported, not the one promoted by the frangeschifachineti.
Two covers by Modugno ("Malarazza" and "Dio come ti amo") close this live performance by the singer-songwriter from Mirto, reminding us what the reference tradition is of this southerner who went around trying to patch up the Duisburg events. And then so much of his music and that of Parto, so many spat out strummed guitars, so many tarantulated folk contaminations, so much music of someone who started to take - started! - the path of a good Paolo Conte. Because the subtle irony is there, and it's already demonstrated just by moving and jumping like a sheep freshly branded with a hot iron when he kicks off "Raggia" (translation: Rage), murderous taranta from an ancient watchtower. Warm and welcoming percussions based on cajon follow this excellent production that reveals a gifted acoustic guitarist in Voltarelli, a good inventor of the anthem of Italians abroad. All the episodes of this album are happy, creating atmospheres for exporting pure South with the sliding tango of "Distratto ma però", the taratazum of "Turismo in quantità" - a piece inspired by the sign of a shop along the Jonica road that sold practically everything - the showpiece "Onda calabra", the poetic, chansonnier, and wonderfully dandy unpublished work "Gigì", dedicated to the Italian French friend far from the sea of Mirto.
Duisburg, Nantes, and Prague have enjoyed this and more. Italy should show a little more consideration.
Cheers, paisà.
Tracklist
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