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Rating: Beatrice Antolini is a mystery.
Her two albums have been the delight of every respectable niche critic: quirky, inspired, supported
by a voice that sweetly squawks between an old-time Kate Bush and intelligent, detailed instrumentation.
The talent of a promise already matured, autonomous, 360° of composite and hysterical charm. At the Italia Wave Rotonda, there were thirty of us under the stage watching (enchanted) Dente's little show (for whom I would only have ecstatic and proud words, yet for now, none come to mind); she follows, with her two words repeated endlessly ("thank you", "thank you so much") and the stage that changes skin.
Her supporting band overwhelms and engulfs her, and rightly so: five instrumentalists (and guest star a piece of Marta Sui Tubi on the electric cello, if I'm not mistaken) who swell and fill the songs with a gigantic and overwhelming charge.
One after another, Antolini's skits unfold without too much stylistic variety but with an escalating intensity
that immobilizes the gaze and auditory apparatus. She, in her shocking green t-shirt that must have thrilled all the gnats of the Rotonda, almost seems a surplus. The four chords of the keyboard are overshadowed by the trumpet and the percussionists (two of them); she moves on her wedges, but the voice has none of the clarity and crystalline liquidity of the much-loved (also by myself, to be clear) studio works. She seems more like Pj Harvey after three sleepless nights in front of an open window in the dead of winter, than a wandering Kate Bush among the stormy peaks.
The tones are hoarse (to be polite, but the exact word would be "wheezing"), dark, almost as if she had smoked a box of Toscanelli after lunch (yet Nada doesn't start a concert without savoring the last puff of her trusted cigar, so something doesn't add up).
After the first twenty minutes, it's clear that the real entertainment is what should serve as decoration; "Funky show", for example, no longer sails in darkness as on the album but crashes, forcefully, against a wall of sounds that doesn't miss a beat. The rest proceeds fiercely along the same line; satisfying, certainly, surrounding, without a doubt. But Beatrice Antolini remains a mystery.
Back home, I play her second album again, finding myself unsure of what to think. Unsure of which Beatrice Antolini is the real Beatrice Antolini; where the true talent resides, how much is genuinely authentic.
The moral of the story, regrettably, is that I don't think I'll be able to listen to a Beatrice Antolini album with the same desire as before: from quirky it has become crippled, if it was inspired before now it reeks too much of stale.
And that's not a good thing.
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