Alessandro Lepore - The Long Silence (2018)

Album cultured and refined, but at the same time rude and engaging this The Long Silence by Alessandro Lepore, multi-instrumentalist with a flokblues matrix. It's been several years since the last unpublished work, 24/7 Twentyfourseven, but this does not mean that Lepore has been firm, indeed. In the middle live, changes of city, new collaborations and also the victory of the Artist who was not there (International section) in the final at the CPM in Milan in 2014, the contest organized by the magazine L'Isola that was not there. And now here it is, decided more than ever to hug his guitar and make us listen to a handful of songs contained in an emblematic title, The Long Silence. 'A long silence', as he jokes about himself, a delay that could seem an eternity for an artist, but as we said the lack of a physical "record" product did not prevent him from shaping and refining his art of performer and 'songwriter' (a term that prefers singer-songwriter). "The Long Silence is a project that has occupied the last two years of my life, I produced and recorded it, and I played practically all the instruments, except for the pedal steel guitar , played by the extraordinary Roby Colella. "

A work then taken care of, especially in the texts and in the search for the sound that best represents it and we can say that the wait is rewarded with ten songs of strong impact. From the first track, the intense So Alone And Missin 'Home, where you immediately perceive in what musical territory you find yourself: metropolitan songwriting ballads, abrasive blues and electric folk, in a sincere act of love towards American music, that extraordinary music in which the thousand American popular traditions blend harmoniously together. Difficult to find something that does not seduce in the essentiality of the ten tracks: from the aforementioned So Alone And Missin 'Home to (beautiful) closure with Wrong Side Of The Road, and in the middle musical pages where everything is calibrated, from the harmony of the sounds (mostly acoustic) to the mastery with which Lepore uses the voice, which astonishes in addition to the deep intensity also for the mastery of a very good English cantatas (some accomplice in the States playing in solo or with "colleagues" bluesman). And then we also find a certain dose of melancholy, of light and shadow, a bit 'of necessary despair that ultimately humanizes and makes the space between who plays and those who listen, thinner, adding a poetic to the project as a whole . A frontier record for these times of "Italian style" that Italian has less and less, as well as style, able only to pursue a mainstream that turns every production to pop, flattening everything and (almost) everyone. Lepore does not give us anything innovative, it is clear, but ten stories from the harsh and neurotic cut, a direct trip on the dusty blue highways in search of the last available dreams. All mediated by a deep and sincere respect for our more songwriting history. The Long Silence is a job to look for and love because the music it is permeated with is pure, artisanal, reassuring even in its commonplaces. Songs to live with intimacy to discover that we are still able to get excited.