Carmen Consoli
Eva Contro Eva

THE REVIEW

We Italians have an innate ability to misjudge artistic phenomena. Proud of our Renaissance, classicism, and Giosuè Carducci, we tend to mock true talent by belittling it and, after having consigned artists with good potential to oblivion, we wait for history to retrace its steps to re-evaluate them (our times range from 30 to 200 years and beyond). We did this with Giorgio Gaber, Pierpaolo Pasolini and we will do it with Oriana Fallaci as with many other intellectuals.

Likewise, Carmen Consoli has now entered the category of artists appreciated by critics and completely misunderstood by much of the public. Why? Simply because she forgot to make an album of covers of Italian oldies and translate it into Spanish, to grab a nice Grammy (Intelligenti pauca) and preferred to unleash her singer-songwriter side, taking inspiration for her latest work from the grotesque and contradictory atmospheres of Sicily, her homeland, the same as Giovanni Verga, to whom the album owes in part the stories that each track tells, stories of miserable everyday life marked by that traditional, at times crude, mentality that characterizes the island (and also a good number of us Italians).

"Eva contro Eva" is the title of this new album, which echoes (as many will have already understood) a famous 1950 film "All About Eva." The first two songs of the album, "Tutto su Eva" and "Maria Catena," address a theme of Pirandellian memory: the impossibility for every individual to escape from a scheme imposed by others, a form that deprives them of any autonomy and integrity, reducing themselves to a character and playing the part that has been assigned to them. Then we move on to the gloomy characters of "Dolce attesa," who sit as spectators in front of the drama of a woman convinced she is pregnant even though she is not, to the dramatic figure of a woman who has been waiting for years for her son to return from the front without being able to convince herself of his death ("Preghiera in gola") and to the neurotic nights of "Piccolo Cesare" afraid that the "Coscienza popolare...offenda la ragione ed alimenti ideali di uguaglianza."

The descriptions of the souls that populate these texts are vivid and the "Cantantessa" almost forces you to become attached to them as if they were part of our individual realities, all accompanied by music with an apparently simple structure that echoes the ancient Italian folk tradition, using simple, tribal, ancestral sounds. The fifth track "Il pendio dell'abbandono" (already the soundtrack of Faenza's film "I giorni dell'abbandono") condenses into a short text the sublime hidden behind solitude, a mixture of contrasting feelings such as the sense of loss and the conscious belief that sooner or later "A warm wind will announce the awakening of better times." The CD closes with "Madre terra," written together with the African Angelique Kidjio; the description of a pan experience (in other words a half-nature romp), "il signor Tentenna," first single and worst track and "Il sorriso di Atlantide"

With this "Eva contro Eva," Consoli absolutely confirms her style and musical abilities but certainly it is not enough to place her in the great stream of Italian singer-songwriters as the evident references to the great Fabrizio De André might suggest (or even suspect).