Umberto Palazzo e il Santo Niente
La vita è facile

THE REVIEW

One of the most underrated albums of that fantastic season for Italian "underground" music that was the second half of the nineties. This work is born after more than six months of complete isolation of the artist from the Marche region, due to a series of events that lead him to complete hermitism, and that transform into a work that is dark and heavy, incredibly claustrophobic... both in the lyrics and in the musical choices.

Palazzo violently distances himself from Massimo Volume due to artistic contrasts, and during the same period loses his girlfriend, and consequently the self-esteem and desire to move forward, so much so that the booklet's iconography unfolds among bandages, blister packs, hospital gauzes, and guitar picks broken and "sewn" back together with office staples... From that talent factory that was Bologna in the nineties, he returns to Marche, to the countryside, and reemerges with the framework of "La Vita è Facile," enlisting Fabio Petrelli on bass and Cristiano Marcelli on drums under the acronym Santo Niente, and enters the recording studio with the artistic production of Marco L.Lega and executive production of Gianni Maroccolo, both from the Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti. The product that emerges is a solid album, a blend of sounds cherished by Helmet, Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Fugazi... constantly imbued with moody melancholy à la Kurt Cobain, all with a typically Mediterranean taste and a noir "sense of humor" that somewhat recalls Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Palazzo has no intention of being unforgiving with the listener; during the most difficult moments of our lives, one can empathize with him, but we will never have a word of comfort or understanding from this album... despite the title. A series of monolithic songs, "Cuore Di Puttana (hardcore)," the title track, "Elvira," "Finalmente Sterile," "Tu Non Mi Dai Nulla," "Fata Morfina," sound like enormous heavy machinery thrown onto roads of burning asphalt, steeped in slightly absurd borderline stories always teetering between reality and fiction... "L'Aborigeno" and "Storia Breve" are the most surprising episodes of the album, tales of implausible characters (a beach bum in the first and a girl who comes out of a nightclub completely drunk in the second), recited with a dry and firm voice that betrays no emotion for the protagonists' stories.

"Hai sempre detto è una brutta situazione, hai sempre detto qui c’è troppa confusione. Hai sempre detto che vuoi qualcosa di migliore. Hai sempre sostenuto una sola soluzione: andarsene via"