I Wanted Magic / Volevo Magia

Autumn comes this year with a magic, Verdena’s latest album, Volevo Magia / I Wanted Magic.
Over those years they released their first three records, — not without a certain feeling of anger mixed with frustration — I always considered the Italian band a fire that lacked the final spark, that extra moment to explode. Then, a quiet afternoon of 2007, Caños, a video clip of a single from their fourth Requiem album, is on QOOB TV. And here we are. I will suddenly realize that from over half of that album, to the dawn of a morning of 2022 — in which I open their video / “non-video” and see them resurface from the glare of a seven-year absence / dream —, those three guys will be one of the most beautiful things that have ever happened to some people in life, and not just musically.

Two brothers and a fan who attends their very first live performances in some village tavern. A love story between the girl with colorful hair and the singer with a sweet and cursed gaze “from the gods” of intuition. A henhouse as a recording studio, a children’s fairy tale while it’s snowing outside. The influences of grunge. Lucio Battisti and The Beatles …

The release of this new album, together with the tour dates, were announced out of the blue, as in their style, just three months earlier — in January, America Latina, music inspired by the D’Innocenzo brothers’ film was released. And, inevitably, my memory flies to the day when, by listening to just a few moments of notes put on in a record store, I discovered that they had released Wow, one of the best things I have ever heard / felt in my entire life span — or perhaps my entire life span all of a sudden enclosed in moments of notes. Those few divine seconds had forcefully put me in front of a real miracle. Although then, to experience it more intimately, in my places, I would have had to wait two weeks, since in the meantime the album was sold out in a few days.

Verdena always arrive with a few imperceptible words at the heart of each beat, in the maze of an emotion, in the same way and in an always different way. There is nothing explainable in a band viscerally loved by a narrow tribe of their own that recognizes an immeasurable talent while clearly dividing into two factions, those of the first three / four albums versus those of the last two / three albums — two of these are double albums. And who knows that the magic invoked in their seventh work, in a time marked by hatred and division, is not to finally unite everyone in a single accomplice vision.

About the title of the album, the singer Alberto Ferrari told Rockol: “It’s like when you hope so much in something, but that something doesn’t happen. And you go on anyway …”

Italian Version