Cello Turns Contradiction Into Confession on “Singing to Serpents”

Marcello Valletta’s background as a poet, actor and performer matters on Singing to Serpents because the record is organized around voice and emotional point of view as much as conventional genre. The track list itself reads almost like a sequence of internal commands and admissions: “Stay Here,” “Elevate,” “Sucks to Be Used,” “Full Moon,” “So Long,” “Cravings,” “Pray,” “Faith,” “Sleeping.” Taken together, the titles sketch a movement between attachment, escape, appetite and belief.

“Stay Here” establishes the stakes

Opening with “Stay Here” is an important structural choice. Before the record reaches transformation or faith, it begins with presence—the difficult request to remain. That positions the album’s emotional world around vulnerability rather than performance. It asks the listener to stay in the room before it starts explaining why.

That framing gives the later titles more weight. “Elevate” can suggest aspiration, but placed beside “Sucks to Be Used” and “Cravings,” growth is never presented as a clean upward line. The album keeps returning to competing impulses: transcendence and appetite, intimacy and self-protection, prayer and exhaustion.

The record’s strength is not that it resolves contradiction. It gives contradiction enough room to become the story.

From confession to spiritual language

The second half of the sequence becomes increasingly direct in its spiritual vocabulary. “Pray” and “Faith” arrive late enough that they do not feel like the premise of the album; they feel like responses to everything that came before. That distinction is important. Singing to Serpents is more compelling as a record about reaching for meaning than as one that claims to possess it.

Valletta’s description of the project as a meeting point between music, spoken-word instinct and personal mythology helps explain the album’s shape. The record is not neatly organized around a single genre identity. Its cohesion comes from the emotional questions that keep resurfacing: what we hold onto, what uses us, what we crave, what we release and what we eventually choose to believe.

A title that changes the frame

Singing to Serpents is a strong title because it can imply danger, seduction, futility or communion depending on how the listener enters the record. The album does not force one interpretation. Instead, the nine-song sequence suggests someone speaking directly to the things that could wound him and trying to understand why the conversation continues.

By the time the record reaches “Sleeping,” the title can read as rest, avoidance or surrender. That ambiguity suits the album. A record this invested in emotional truth would lose something if its final gesture were too neat.

Verdict: Singing to Serpents works best as a record of internal motion. Its central achievement is the way the track sequence turns vulnerability, desire and spiritual searching into one continuous emotional argument without pretending that healing happens in a straight line.