The new record of Fr. Sergio Palumbo will be released on Saturday 15 April on iTunes and the principal digital stores, where it can be bought.

    A warm appeal to feeling: on this insistent appeal is based the overall definition of the music of Father Sergio Palumbo, music that seems to distil the crowded agitation of the heart in notes and words, in order to denounce, proclaim and defeat the inanity of the void; music that ignites in the bottleneck of the soul, which is strongly rooted in living in contact with pain.

Sergio Palumbo does not hold back in singing about life in the material reality of daily life and he does this without blurs, with a clear language, in which the Love of the Father stands out in a heaven that welcomes. “I am nothing without you” is an imploration of man to the Heavenly Father that is born from awareness of a human misery that is increasingly bound to the post of shame, of denial and of distance.

These are notes and words that are charged and enriched by suggestions, feelings and infinite appeals that respond to the truth of life, to the complexity of existence, but which are in perfect harmony with the message of Christ.

These compositions do not halt at the surroundings – albeit of a net character – of the malaise of living, nor do they end in the pleasant fascination of harmony: this is music that frees us from the vertigo of the human in order to be translated from being a sign to being an outline, pathway, road, journey, choice, faith…A cognitive tension that traverses conflicts, placating them: the texts, in fact, do not have the banal function of repetition or of recording existence but, rather push towards a transcendent dimension, thereby exorcising the death of the soul…And the melody becomes a setting of innocence and truth, which highlights evil, excludes the vanity of the Self, and outlines the way of salvation.

     In ‘I am nothing without you’ words and music come together, therefore, in a harmonious crescendo of human desires and faith: questions and uncertainties melt, transported by a wind ‘that will blow over your thoughts’ and ‘fly higher and look inside you’.

     The invitation to fly high is not a suggestion, because it presents a precise solicitation: “tell me what you see”, calling the conscience to be and the heart to feel.

     The vitality of the music is united to the vitality of the words that are used but never abused, and opens the heart to hope. In the melodies, never exaggerated high notes refer to tones of whispered invocations and sweet prayer, and to such an extent as to fuse with the loving and austere serenity of the words of the Gospel: “When the Son of Man comes”…“I was hungry, I was a stranger”…and it is then that one can taste the joy of the embrace of the Father with disarming pleasure, on the condition, however, that it becomes words of life that are located in a context in harmony with the melody on which they feed…“I will raise you up from pain”…“I will save you from all melancholy”… “You are beyond the Universe”… “You are the voice that I hear in the wind”…“And in hands charity”… “From that Cross he has already come down…”

And it is in this disarming fascination that the word of life becomes decisive, the unique, only, hope for Man. In this collection high up in heaven there stands out the cry of rebellion against violence against women: “run quickly towards the sun…close to the corner, deceived…the fetid odour of mud…you wanted to be a butterfly”.

An invocation to ‘never again’ that does not find an answer even in the question addressed to ‘Love’.

One thus sees on the horizon the initially obscured, but then increasingly clear, image of the Son who returns to the Father imploring His Forgiveness…and the essence of man becomes a song, in the limitless desire for love, to be lived in a close and intense relationship with the other.

By Arturo Carapella

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