We really deserve YES! BOOM! VOILÀ! – Rockon.it

Article by Marzia Picciano | Photo by Katarina Dzolic

I would like to say something particularly striking or illuminating about the concert YES!BOOM!VOILÀ! of last night in Santeria Tuscany of Milan, but I just have to repeat, very banally, that they rocked. They pissed me off a little. And that yes, I had the urge to leave immediately for Graspopas if until now I had completely underestimated the urgency of metal in my personal daily playlist (to the joy of Andrea Ripamonti).

However, it was not the band's aim, under any circumstances, to foment the revival of specific genres; however, it is indisputable that the stage presence of NAIP (Michelangelo Mercurivoice of the band) exudes, on the one hand, very clearly his past as a 'dissident' (and for this it is enough to listen or see HOLY NUMBERS), on the other the histrionic ability, theatrical and physical, to align all the stars on the stage in finding form and identity, yes, passing through Giulio Ragno Favero, Roberta Sammarelli, Davide Lasala And Giulia Formica.

Yes! Boom! Voila! in concert at Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan February 2026 — Yes! Boom! Voila! in concert at Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan photo by Katarina Dzolic for www.rockon.it

This is one of the most interesting aspects of this – I would call it – live experimentwe know who we are seeing, yet we don't really know him, at least not yet. Or rather: we know it very well, but we need a hand to understand it.

This was one of the objectives of the YES!BOOM!VOILÀ! at least as I understood it by interviewing them at the beginning of January Voice – Triennialon the occasion of their press-confessional conference, when they gave us theirs “artistic project” sight unseen.

We wouldn't have known anything until the first date in Livorno.

The next day I was already listening to them, and with great pleasure (surprise!) to find myself in what I had been told, even between the lines. Operation incitement to listen was successful, all that was needed was to see them live and, VOILÀhere we are Santeria.

Without wanting to disappoint those who expect a slavish review of the live performance, which among other things followed the script now well tested in previous dates, with precise passages, from reading the newspaper on the powerful A PIECE OF THE SWANS to the mosh pit session (yes, everyone is ready in Santeria too, even for the wall of love), but not without obvious improvisation, it must be said that if I limited myself to telling how it went piece by piece, I wouldn't get to the point.

I repeat: they succeeded, they wanted to do something new, compared to them, and they succeeded, I must say, much more than others.

And they also did something new, intentionally or not, we'll know later. They put on a falsely semi-serious show, made up of parodic pantomimes, ballets, staff on stage in loops with and without loop stations, not too veiled mockery of the hysterical-performative hyper-protagonism of the singers of our generation and obviously games, including the Neapolitan lottery in autotune by END OF EVERYTHING SALE (only the budgie was missing) alongside a cascade of guitars, basses and drums.

A very serious concert indeed, which opens and closes with a sonorous coda, where in the crazy randomness of the chaos generated with extreme naturalness by a group of artists fully aware of their role on stage, the words, the lyrics of NAIP they arrive like daggers in the soft flesh: you absorb the blow, while you understand that the iron has sunk in, with all the blood.

There are passages on this album, of a disarming simplicity to be honest, which find a way, in combining perfectly with the score, not to be ignored. And maybe it's the beginning of the year, and we are no longer energized but still crippled by the previous one, and in me they resonated like the incredibly evident truths that the psychotherapist dispenses to me after fifty unbearable minutes of Joycean flow of consciousness.

That “he who breathes”, that “It scares me, and it seems crazy to me/Knowing each other so well and then suddenly saying goodbye” with all the arrangement pushing them in the direction of my stomach, they speak to me more frankly than I am capable of doing alone, looking in the mirror. They also do it in real time, from the stage. Especially if in the meantime a construction foreman's spotlight is shone in my face.

Perhaps because in the end the truncheons remind us, for better and unfortunately too much for worse, that the solid state exists; that in short gravity exists and we all get hurt, we exist right? And therefore we must accept everything that comes, not hide behind a finger.

Do we need a concert based on the dualism between the sweetness of the absurd and the roughness that underlies every desire to knock down walls by scratching the instruments, to understand it? To hypnotize us in the absurd grace of NAIP that bends over acoustic guitar while Roberta Sammarelli it's really bringing down the whole room as it closes FROM SCRATCH?

It is not easy to be ironic, nor to provide the usual, now cloying, critical reading of the socio-cultural milieu that we have had to endure. It's giving a wake-up call, a shock PINOCCHIO (for that the battery is enough Julia Ant), not so much to recover from the big lies of which we think we are victims, but from those which with a certain paraculism we foist on ourselves so as not to die of panic attacks. Stop pretending to be THE GOOD THOSE (the “new single” cit., which most winks at the electronic experiments of NAIP).

There is much more behind the talent – and the story, I might add – of Michelangelo, Giulia, Roberta, Giulio and Davide. And discovering it is a very valid reason to go and see them.

Click here to see the photographs of YES! BOOM! VOILÀ! or browse the gallery below.