Dilaila
Ellepi

This album called "Ellepi" I've been listening to, in more or less definitive versions, for more than two years. Two years are a long time. Love stories begin and end and start anew, jobs are started, lost, one graduates, has children, relocates, falls ill and recovers (sometimes). Keeping an album like this in a drawer for two years is difficult - and I speak from personal experience; not because I've ever recorded albums like this, but because in my small way I, too, have had to go through the hardships (games?) of the Italian music industry; and also from indirect experience, having witnessed the stages that laboriously brought this work to light.

And the Italian music industry, I'll say it only once at the beginning and then let it go, must be truly shortsighted, if not dazed, not to notice gems like this in the making and to let them slip by without wanting to seize them on the fly. But we know that the laws of the market are idiotic, and those who apply them are often much more so.

So thanks to Pippola Music for believing in it and finally publishing it, and a big tsk tsk to the others.

The divine Patty, Ivan Graziani [may God have him in glory], Mina, golden bob Caselli (for instance, where is she? Busy producing whom?), the inevitable Battisti, Morgan in the apartment for the subtle taste for detail and for the decadent baroqueness of certain solutions. "Ellepi," and the title reveals it, starts from these Italian traits that make us proud, and goes - adding here and there a touch of a certain Anglo-Saxon taste in sounds and rhythms, arrangements and harmonies - up to the peaks of the Pyrenees, along with Paola's voice, which I honestly don't know anyone else who sings like this*. It is a short album, as they used to make; Settembre opens melancholically, "la mattina bere e la notte ancor di più," "le scarpe bianche e blu" like Ivan's indeed, a summer pier and looking elsewhere, poignant; then Pensiero, simple like Linda dancing and so beautiful it seems fake, and Sapore di sangue sweet as can be, with Paola's long vowels vibrating roundly, and Luca's piano brushing impressionistically flocks in cloudy skies. The guitars of Tutta l'aria che c'è are hung between John Lennon and Adriano Celentano, Ally tells, sitting in a circle on the ground, a dreamy and dark metropolitan tale, The sleeper is a tango (!) where guitar, piano, and drum embroidery intertwine on Paola's words, "non amo scegliere, mi rende vulnerabile / il treno parte, non importa, lo guardo da qui." And then there's Il trono, which is the chair of a condemned man - the least Italian track, the psychedelic tail is priceless with its spiral harmonic cycle, as well as the refrains in which the voice (pardon the repeated enthusiasm) gives chills more than the electricity it sings of. To close, Oh no!, surprising in its unfolding like a crazed snake among crooked choirs, syncopated rhythms and sardonic trombones; and the wonderful Il tamburo di latta, a desolate and melancholic fado, a peak for me who loves sad songs.

An album like this, "independent," has it all, in intentions and execution, and nothing, in usability and ambitions. The sound is round, dense and majestic (you can hear the recording at Officine by Mauro Pagani, and the production by Gianluca Mancini as well). The composition, thanks to Claudio Cicolin, Luca Bossi, and Paola Colombo herself, is sure and focused. The arrangements are successful and surprising: each track hides a roll, a bass line, a guitar flicker, a piano chord, a brass or synthesizer embroidery, as valuable as they are philologically perfect. What is not hidden, and I repeat it once again because repetita iuvant, is this voice: there aren't many voices like this.

This album is a cameo of class, elegance, precision and imagination in writing and interpretation. In my ideal country, Dilaila would win Sanremo.

* yes, I know this is wrong.