BRUNORI SAS - L’albero delle noci

We've already talked at length about Sanremo 2025, pointing out how much the Festival benefited from the presence of Lucio Corsi, Joan Thiele and Brunori Sas, useful in reminding the mainstream national audience of the importance of what's happening in Italy's musical undergrowth, as well as the quality of a certain kind of songwriting that remains the preserve of too narrow an audience. Thanks to the megaphone of the Teatro Ariston, every now and then a little justice gets done, and "L'albero delle noci", the song Dario Brunori brought to the competition, picked up some genuinely respectable recognition: an unexpected (going into the night) third place, plus the coveted Premio Sergio Bardotti for Best Lyrics. It's a track that recounts the uncontainable joy of fatherhood, written for little Fiammetta, born in October 2021. And it hardly matters that the vocal register the Cosenza-born singer-songwriter adopts for the verse hews calligraphically close to the De Gregori of "Rimmel", disproving the claims immortalized in a hilarious skit with Michela Giraud (dig it up on YouTube, it's genuinely funny) according to which Dario is only capable of impersonating Tiziano Ferro and Franco Califano.

Jokes aside, today Dario Brunori, born in 1977, has reached the highest level of popularity of his career after five critically acclaimed albums, so much so that he'll soon have the chance to play in arenas and some of Italy's most prestigious venues, across two special evenings accompanied by an orchestra. To shape the stylistic direction of the new album, tasked with consolidating his fame and visibility, he chose to work alongside Riccardo Sinigallia, who co-produced the record (and it shows) and contributed to the writing of several songs, in one case with the additional input of Antonio Dimartino. The three of them also performed together on Sanremo's duets night, delivering an acclaimed cover of Lucio Dalla's "L'anno che verrà" by Lucio Dalla. But back to "L'albero delle noci": it's a stylistically rather varied album, where alongside the impeccable formal elegance of tracks like "Per non perdere noi", a true singer-songwriter gem, and "La vita com'è" (already featured in the soundtrack of the film "Il più bel secolo della mia vita", complete with a David di Donatello nomination), the guitars often take center stage, outlining an unprecedented "rock" urgency, reaffirmed in "La ghigliottina", "Il morso di Tyson" and "Più acqua che fuoco".

Brunori blends erudite and popular references in the same mix, mixing high and low (somewhat in the manner of Francesco Bianconi), pairing the refined jazzy atmospheres of the nocturnal outdoor scene "Luna nera" with the folk-ballad "Pomeriggi catastrofici", a small portrait of the eternal unchangeability of family life in the provinces. The provinces, the roots, which also emerge in the inconsolable grief of "Fin'ara luna", an ode sent by the story's protagonist to the partner of a lifetime who has slipped away. Birth, love and death: these are the dominant themes of the record, which, alternating between irony and melancholy, closes by returning to the theme of becoming a father, once again in a thoroughly personal way. Small glimpses of ordinary everyday life that Dario manages to make universal, asserting himself with a genuinely successful project, more than five years after the previous "Cip!", whose promotion was frustrated by the arrival of the pandemic and all the ensuing social-distancing decrees. We recall a splendid performance (it could only be followed via streaming) at the Barezzi Festival 2020, in an empty Teatro Regio in Parma.

Having regained his footing, Brunori now delivers one of the most accomplished and incisive chapters of his artistic career, establishing himself once and for all among the best Italian singer-songwriters, not just of his generation.

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27/02/2025