Elisa
Asile's World

THE REVIEW

Each of Elisa's first four albums represents a season, in a completely subjective vision.

If "Pipes And Flowers", the first album, was the symbol of summer, the second, "Asile’s World", an emblematic title, represents the season opposite to the first, winter. This is Elisa's full-blown crisis album, where she tries in every way to cling to some value to survive in the world. This search leads her to experiment with a genre that happens to be opposed to the pop-rock sounds of the first; in fact, here Elisa has been dubbed an Italian Björk.

But Elisa is not Björk, primarily because the music of the latter is of such sounds by choice, whereas the choice of these sounds is due to the necessity of searching, searching, and searching without finding… What is described is Elisa's world in reverse (Asile is Elisa spelled backward), a world turned upside down, almost as if it were without reference points. That's why many songs are strange, seeming like commercial pop, but strangely they do not linger in the mind; or, in others, beauty is sought no longer in the voice but in particular, strange sounds (some bear an oriental influence, others have sounds that brush against the tribal), or in truly emblematic and hermetic lyrics that may sometimes seem nonsensical but gain a sense, a different meaning for each of us.

At times, the album does not seem homogeneous, but may seem more than anything a compilation, I do not deny it, but the homogeneity here is not given by the sounds, but by an anguish that seems to pervade the entire album. It seems that Elisa cannot live in the world and needs to live in another that becomes, however, a mirror to reality…
Perhaps the most complex album of Elisa, perhaps the most fascinating in its strange atmospheres, perhaps, but definitely the most explicitly symbolic and challenging, where it seems difficult, if not impossible, to get into the artist's mind… Fascinating and magical…