Elisa
L' Anima Vola

First and hopefully last album entirely sung in Italian by Elisa Toffoli. In her native language, her voice is almost terrible, which, to be intellectually honest, was not the case with her work in English, and it has palpably worsened over time. In this latest work, her tone is nothing short of irritating, accentuated by an excess of regional accent that she has always had and never improved (another local case is Francesco Renga), lack of robustness, and further worsened by poor equalization, the last of which cannot be attributed to her directly. Although her subtle voice is paradoxically under-mixed here, and the album is rather poorly recorded and "stuffed" with not very credible electronic percussion parts, she, who has always disparaged Pro Tools, does not seem to have performed any miracles with the almost always now useless "big studios"...

Songs with chants and choruses that pound your head, repetitive, tedious, and cloying and in reality, not very inspired, even though in Italy it's enough to put the word love next to other similar banalities to shout a miracle. In one word: overrated and overrated. In the phrase: "L'anima mica si spegne" from "L'Anima Vola", all her childishness of a fourth-grade essay and gratuitous demagoguery. Moreover, and unfortunately, she too has "adapted" to the all-Italian custom, but sometimes not only, of singing endlessly without leaving space for the instruments and instrumentalists, who rightly, being session musicians also "paid," do not care and let the "starlette" of the moment have the "loud voice," creating the illusion that to create a complete and valid work, one just needs to perform "gargles" squawking everywhere...

Among the worst episodes is the opening "Lontano da qui," where, in my opinion, it's hard to distinguish the words of the various harmonized, excessively filtered, and monotonous choruses, the already mentioned title track "L'Anima Vola," a little song with philosophical pretensions from the "Cuore" book and the same goes for "Specchio Riflesso" where words are repeated ad nauseam with not entirely convincing singing. In "Ancora qui," it "disturbs" none other than the beginning of "Per Elisa" of "Beethovenian" memory with some interesting piano dissonances, but, the high note range of "ours" and her usual persistence in repeating a single word endlessly end up ruining the whole.

But her voice doesn't convince in any of the tracks, not even in the better ones like "Un filo di seta negli abissi," which contrasts a text of unmatched banality with music that is at least partly successful, although it too is repetitive and saturated with vocals, and in the final "Ecco che," which, all things considered, turns out perhaps the least bad. Unlistenable "Non fa niente ormai," which I would overlook, especially for the embarrassing ending (refer to usual choruses that need much more not to turn out, if nothing else, annoying...). To conclude, I am sorry to be pitiless because, as a musician myself, I don't like being judged negatively, and I always try to find the "good" in almost all music "efforts."

I hope Toffoli returns to singing as she did in her more than decent debut album and beyond, hoping that these "enlightened" and "Italiot" record executives, often endowed with too much and undeserved "power," come to their senses and look "beyond," consolidating for already established artists their rightful inclinations.