Elisa
On

Hello to you! I have a long preamble to make in the presence of this album: I'm not related to 'Bandecchi.
This artist, once super-cool, became a mother for the first time 10 autumns ago to a beautiful baby boy, Sebastian Rigonat (you might say, what do we care in terms of the CD that you'll bravely review, maybe without doing the track-by-track?). Well, we should care because this event jeopardized not only the extrinsic quality of Elisa Toffoli's music but also the compositional organization and the reliability of her voice... and here I tend to overlook her having participated solo in Sanremo and winning it: Cocciante, Anna Oxa, Simone Cristicchi, and more recently, my fellow regional Gabbani had only thus gained more visibility, yes, but their repertoires as a whole are not crap [and the Festival itself, except for some obscene editions here and there (especially 2006 and 2014), was still watchable].
The Toffolian voice, in agreement with the atmospheres of her new repertoire of things and little things including anonymous versions of those "that were," for a decade is no longer recognizable and that trilateral artistic compromise (made person) among Samantha Brown, Alanis Morissette, and Bjork suddenly disappeared forever...congratulationem Maria de F. et tortoribus: you managed with pounding dirty money to freeze a soul for the time useful to suck away an essence.
Goodbye voice, goodbye artist's essence.
And when this is the case for a mature audience like ours, we secondly dismiss the people to whose universe the "exalted victim" belongs, especially if we come from her same district, and this saddens us a little.
We might at the very least not deliberately ignore the residual human being whose new words have failed, but certainly, we find a damned way to throw their entire being into a sort of purgatory, a lost and found place for those who in another Era were now held firmly in virtue. Such an action says more about us as a society than it will ever say about the individual-thinking organism...so what about this album?, you might be thinking. I'll get there now, 'ulalloro, just a couple of darn sweaty paragraphs.

Even the decline of the beautiful general-purpose radios of yesteryear, not to mention that of the artistic-musical critique press, well before the advent of loosely unhitched ticks like Ariete/Gianmaria and products all smoke and no fire like Kolors or Måneskin have marked us as a Nation: our descendants, in almost all cases, will develop an imagination as rich in integrity with the raw Real as devoid of neuroscientific resistance and temporal elasticity.

A lack of Elasticity in Elisa already in the introductory track of On, Bad Habit: the Gorizian clearly imitates the more commercial side of LP (born Laura Pergolizzi), in a sequence of notes, synth-pitch melodies always the same, and a cliché text that doesn't help at all.
Same goes for the second, even though it tends more towards Europop and Gospel, an episode that after the first listen even on the best days tires at the second bridge. Then there's a series of more danceable triplets with pseudo-retro taste, two of which have a "Love" in the name and (horror of horrors) well reiterated in them.

Something then going forward seemed to me discarded material from an ideal musical of the 2000s set in the late childhood period of Elisa and never come to fruition: like Ready Now, where she uselessly screams every 3 seconds, as well as HOFAM (a title that was missing a little E-word at the end to make me laugh and stop on Sunday). But let's move on, because the manure doesn't end here... in the slow With The Hurt returns the influence of LP's lighter production mixed with some insubstantial pop by Lana del Rey or Michelle Branch. What a bunch of decent balls.
Boring and devoid of ideas then the track with the 2 seasoned Salentines Sangiorgi and Marrone, with an aftertaste of self-parody à trois at the end.
The only decent one so far would have been Catch the Light, a sort of unpublished b-side of any single-ballad from Lotus or Heart: it's a Birdy-like crossover of neofolk and late r&b with an apparently empty and/or carefree text, but that towards the end stubbornly condemns the addiction-phenomenon that hit those kids now about twenty-three.

Do I have poor tastes in the local area? I'll come to terms with it, but not without having said what flaws the omnipresence of a filthy bastard named Michele Canova Iorfida has produced.
Besides the terrible No Hero (the little ghost of Sia? not even a flying rag) and the gigione duet with Savoretti (here irrelevant), among the lowest points of this On I perceived there to be "Bruciare per te", stuff that seems written by a seventeen-year-old who barely knows true Italian singer-songwriter music and Anglo-Saxon or Celtic folk (and not at all indie-alternative). Another toy, more tending towards supermarket electrofunky of DNCE and Maroon5, is Peter Pan, with the cowardly inclusion of a computerized vocal effect at the second minute that will tend to reappear 5-6 times and will completely demolish the expectations of tearing the ticket for at least a consolatory finale.

Consolatory for anyone who understands "healthy" music in 2024 and beyond.

Obviously, I listened to it all last night on Spotify armed with headphones and counter-headphones*, mainly because the signs in the media at the time didn't convey anything positive to me and thus acting hasn't, fortunately, affected neither my wallet nor the moods of the elderly tenants downstairs. DeBeauty and DeBeast, of course! I wanted to delve deeper to not be assailed by yet another Ubbia, and I don't regret it. What else? I eagerly await a local review of Ritorno al Futuro-Back 2 Future from 2022, of which I know a couple of Italian songs (neither fish nor fowl), a "work" where Elisa says she wants to reconnect with her beginnings... who knows!

*the swimming pool one to be proud of