One of the most interesting and encouraging growth in the history and tradition of Italian music of the last four decades comes, year after year, from an increasing amount of artists expressing their love for their own local roots, not only through lyrics narrating ordinary tales of daily lives of the past and present but also by singing in the dialect of their own regions, as a way to preserve their multi-centenary heritage from a modern society that, too often, has got the tendency to nullify and erase everything that doesn't fit the suffocating rhythms that life imposes on all of us every day.
To be perfectly honest, it doesn't take that much to fall in love at first glance to a record like La Grande Corsa Verso Lupionòpolis (The Great Run Towards Lupionòpolis) from Peppe Voltarelli, one of the most exciting Italian singer/songwriters even if you may not understand a word neither of Italian language nor of Calabria's (Italian Southern Region) local dialect.
Released in 2023, two years after Voltarelli's last studio album called Planetario, La Grande Corsa Verso Lupionòpolis is an exquisitely written, sang and played record that exalts the enormous love and respect that the Italian artist has for his own region and, at the same time, constitutes for Voltarelli himself a trip to Memory Lane, where the singer/songwriter revisits with disarming passion and genuineness places, feelings, flavours and smells of his native region that made and makes the man and artist he is today.
Voltarelli's new record is an exciting vulture of different sounds, a fabulous sonic hybrid that involves Folk, Tango, Jazz, Waltz and little touches of World Music enclosed in 10 original tracks (with 8 of them sang in Calabria's dialect), where the Italian artist displays, together with a very inspired song-writing style, his deep, intense, emotional and, at times, even gently playful singing voice, from which the complete passion for his roots emerges and shines in an outstandingly beautiful fashion.
Throughout the duration of the record, Voltarelli becomes sometimes director and other times the protagonist of his songs' stories, thanks to the cinematic narrative that he so cleverly applies in his songs.
La Grande Corsa Verso Lupionòpolis is a record that will make you smile, dream, think and perhaps, just perhaps, even if you have never been to Calabria in Italy before, invite you to visit a part of Italy that has so much beauty to offer, not only from a visual aspect but also from an emotional one, thanks to the fabulous skills of Peppe Voltarelli as the best possible Raconteur of his roots and his world. A part of Italy that, thankfully, has also gifted the art of music with a tremendously inspired artist like Voltarelli, who, through his brand new record, has reached musical heights of unsurpassable quality.
La Grande Corsa Verso Lupionòpolis is out now and it is available to be purchased at Peppe Voltarelli’s Official Bandcamp Page .
