Claudio Lolli
Aspettando Godot

THE REVIEW

Here we are only at the debut, although for some this episode might already showcase Lolli’s poetics at its peak, only to soften later. For me, things are a bit different: this first LP, "Aspettando Godot", as well as its successor, "Un uomo in crisi", suffers excessively from the contrast between this twenty-year-old, I believe, and the world. The songs of the first and second LP are obsessively centered on existential discomfort, on the thesis that life is a wrong, perverse, and unacceptable principle. Okay, nothing could be truer, yet the poetic potential suffers, stifled by the need to express one's pain. The exclusivity of the theme, let's face it, not too original either, inevitably causes attention to fade after a while. And if the title track is a masterpiece, and if "Borghesia" initiates a social and political discourse that will later be amplified, the LP, even though it has ten songs, seems to last for hours.

In short, in this review, I try to refute those who say that "Aspettando Godot" is a masterpiece. It could have been, without a doubt. But the theses are sparse, the tendency to wallow in self-pity is sometimes overused and ceases to be creative. If there are some beautiful verses in "Quelli come noi", by that point, we are no longer in the mood to hear the same things as in the previous tracks, and the piece does not captivate us much. The anger, the resentment, the regret, which would have made us shiver and feel anguish in "Quanto amore"; "Quello che mi resta", "Quando la morte avrà", instead sound like stories we already know how they will end, like the last little fish in a lake where fishing has already been done for the previous songs. Another theme to touch upon is the evident analogy with Guccini, united by a similar poetic choice, simple, different from the hermetic style of De André or De Gregori (a separate discussion deserves Vecchioni, who has his own style, difficult to imitate), so the due analogy with Guccini leads me to further dismiss the album, which is still enjoyable to listen to. Lolli is a lyricist I love very much; in fact, the album has no minor tracks, the tracks are excellent, that’s the irony! But it's the idea at the base that limits the album, rarely does it stray far from the theme of human difficulty and, for this same theme, forgive me, but I prefer Guccini’s "La collina", "C. della bambina portoghese", "C. per Piero", etc.. 

With the next album, Lolli will decide that in "Aspettando Godot" he hasn't expressed himself enough and will return to the same themes, updating very little and rendering the album somewhat sterile, the songs will sometimes be so anonymous that they can be confused with those of the previous LP. See the obvious analogies ("Angoscia metropolitana"; "Hai mai visto una città"); ("Morire di leva"; "Quanto amore"), ("La giacca"; "Borghesia"), however, for the latter, I add that they form a beautiful pair of successful and inspired tracks.

To conclude, Lolli writes very beautiful things, but he should have chosen his targets better, framed other themes as well, to avoid the risk of becoming one of those authors for whom the LP format is unbearable, and we can only enjoy them in small doses.

"Aspettando Godot" is an important and beautiful album to listen to, the original and simple poetry of Lolli suffers from having to always deal with the same subject, almost always writing the same song, then that his skill allows him to do it for two albums and still make some people fall in love with him is another story. But at this point, the Guccinian in me wants to emerge and tell you that, quite frankly, if I want to listen to existential tracks, I'll put on "Stanze di vita quotidiana".