Four years after the previous album, “Appunti di viaggio” (2019), the new Sfaratthons album has been released, entitled “Odi et amo”.
Composed between 2020 and 2022, the third album by the band from Borrello, in the province of Chieti, presents seven new songs, including five minisuites lasting more than 8 minutes, in the tradition of progressive rock.
Drawing inspiration from the famous thousand-year-old verses of Catullo, the music of the Sfaratthons and the lyrics of the poet Donato Di Luca stage joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, hate and love, reason and feeling. Also on this album the sounds are enriched by Geoff Warren's wonderful flute.
The album begins with a musical suite entitled Odi et amo, in which celestial atmospheres generated by a piano or a Mellotron alternate with sharp Moog phrasings and hyperbolic flute virtuosity.
In the song La donna amata, a long musical introduction, powerful, enveloping, swirling, heralds the expectation of seeing one's woman again as soon as possible, like when, during the summer, one awaits a regenerating storm.
The hard, heartbreaking, mystical and sinful life of a village woman is addressed in the dialect song Maddalena.
The album also features a tribute to the greatest poet of all, Saffo, in a song where the Teramo saxophonist Sabatino Matteucci appears as a guest.
The song Zarina, composed by the flautist Geoff Warren (with lyrics by Pietro Lugli), tells of a late nineteenth-century love story of a fourteen-year-old who married a tsar too early, linked by a strong feeling of love and gratitude towards Italy and, in particular, towards the Ligurian town of Sanremo,
a place which, in September 2020, was a source of inspiration for the English flautist, who in those days was performing with the Sfaratthons on the prestigious Ariston stage.
Finally, Odi et amo is a record conceived largely during the pandemic period and it includes the song Ti dono una canzone, recorded remotely and released as a single in May 2020, with which the band pays homage to all the healthcare and para-healthcare personnel, the true heroes of the pandemic period.
Odi et amo – closing session closes the album by recalling the main theme of the title track: it is played by the flute, which revisits it and alternates it with continuous improvisations, all accompanied by voices and sounds that seem to come from an indefinite time and space .
Faithful traveling companions of Luca Di Nunzio (keyboards, guitars and vocals), Cecilio Luciano (drums), Mario Di Nunzio (bass), Giovanni Casciato (guitars) and Giovanni Di Nunzio (vocals and guitar) are the artist Luca Luciano, who created the splendid cover painting, and Massimo Di Muzio who has been taking care of the sound for years
of the band in live performances and who was the creator of the sounds and final mixes of the new album.
