“And in the end, the love you give is equal to the love you”.
With this laconic sentence of vague Beatlesian memory, Crevasses and Puddles, the first song of Ladybirds, the last album of the Italian band,ends. If we think about it for a moment, the value of life has been deeply attacked and diminished in the last three years, because the pandemic and the war in Ucraine, have shocked us with (thrown in our face) its less acceptable and at the same time more natural aspect, namely death. And as a result, even the role of love has been profoundly downsized, sometimes flattening out by compulsion or, on the contrary, exploding uncontrollably, in all its strength; a sort of coincidence of extremes and consequent loss of its enormous power.
Both must regain the balance and the role they had won in the pre-pandemic era; and this new album means-wants to be a wish in that sense.
The main novelties of the seventh official record of Twenty Four Hours, entitled Ladybirds, are the four tracks sung in italian (which had already appeared in the single A i u t ò l a) and the entry of the saxophonist Ruggero Condó. The remaining line-up is the same from the Left-To-Live sessions onwards (2014) and the historical core Lippe-Paparelli-Lippe is unchanged since 1987. The album was recorded in numerous sessions starting from August 2021 in Fano (the bases live, very funny!) up to the last guitar finishing in Locorotondo (Antonio), passing through Turin (Marco and Elena’s voices), Pineto (Ruggero’s sax) and again Fano (voices, keyboards, some parts of bass and guitar with Paolo-Bass).
As for the choice of sounds and arrangements, after the experience of Venetian production with Andrea Valfrè, we decided to go back to the origins (The Smell of The Rainy Air, Oval Dreams) with a self-production conducted by Paolo, but that involved, in an exhausting work of comparison for any production choice, all the components in equal measure.
The delicate phases of recording and mixing were conducted with the same criteria as the previous albums, preserving as much as possible the natural timbre and dynamics. The mixing, all digital, was carried out from May to July 2022, with the invaluable help of 2 great professionals in the audio sector: Fabio Serra and Dario Ravelli (the latter also took care of the mastering phase), already collaborators with parallel projects by Elena and Marco (Feronia, Nirnaeth), while Andrea Valfrè mixed in analog domain the single that will precede the release of the album, “Unexpected Results”.
The themes of the songs are as always social, introspective and multifaceted: love, permanent war, discrimination of the types of immigrants, but above all an unprecedented, autobiographical and highly original dedication to the artistic work of the band in these 34 years of activity that is expressed in the poignant ballad “Una Perla Vive Nascosta Tutta la Vita”.
The structure (typology) of the songs is also very variable: some are very simple and without particular overlap compared to what was recorded live (Crevasses & Puddles, Incantesimo K44, Ghost Pension), while three pieces in particular present the classic Progressive-Psychedelic structure (Caroline , Eterno Grembo che Dona, Why Should I Care for Strangers!).
Finally, the title and the extensive graphic references to ladybugs, which, however, are hidden in the disc and are “discovered” only by opening the CD package, just as if they were a pearl, trying to propose an alternative philosophy of life that is decidedly the polar opposite of prevailing madness that has found nothing better than a bloody war, as a response to the hardship and deaths of two years of the pandemic.
Personnel Paolo Lippe: Keyboards, Vocals, Bassline, Ukulele, Virtual Drums and Creative Mixing.
Antonio Paparelli: Lead Electric and Acoustic Guitar
Marco Lippe: Drums, Percussion, Rototoms, Vocals, Piano on Tracks 2 and 7
Ruggero Condò: Tenor and Soprano Saxophones
Paolo (Bass) Sorcinelli: Bass, Classical and Electric Guitar
Elena Lippe: Vocals
Guest Musician
Francesco D’Orazio plays a 1711 Guarneri Violin on “Hypocrite and Slacker God”
