Leah Andreone
Veiled

THE REVIEW

The fields in bloom, her very long hair, her leather pants, the plain-colored shirts... But most of all, her voice: the exasperation of a cackling goose ("You-uha, you-uha, you-uha, oughta kno-o-owuha"), the insistence, the forcing at all costs to reach the end of the verse without a breath of air in her lungs, the asthma and self-induced pharyngitis to improve performances, the cycles of DDT aerosols to undergo, the oral vaginitis to be experimented in the research labs of major record companies...

Since MTV put Alanis Morissette and her not-so-great "You Oughta Know" in heavy rotation, nothing was the same: her way of singing became renowned everywhere, becoming indeed the reference style for the new female pop-rock recruits. Each one found herself (forced?) to develop her own version of the Canadian goose's mating call: some anticipated the barking by a quarter of a second, some fainted due to respiratory insufficiency at every verse, some composed rhymes where, for example, "you-uah" rhymed with "do-uha" and others rhymed "idiosyncrasy-uha" with "misunderstatement-uha"...

Here from where we come from, the miracle of the laboratory creation of a Catania girl who only sings when she inhales... And along with the French-Canadian cackling goose and besides the Sicilian owl-quail and the anorexic Irish swan, emerged even the less famous egg-laying hen from San Diego, California, known as Leah Andreone, whose vocals unmistakably echo the pains of ovulation inside a twenty-square-centimeter cage.

"It's Alright, It's Ok", a highly catchy single even on Italian radios, has Leah executing an American pop-rock piece like even a three-year-old girl wouldn't manage, and then, just before a very radio-friendly chorus begins, she ventures in a vocal exercise that, the first time I heard it, I thought "this woman is crazy!".

We laughed, not because when I laugh everyone must laugh and when I stop everyone must stop, but perhaps because we all simultaneously thought we were scraping the bottom of the barrel, and that certain girls, in order to stand out, would do anything, even choose this interpretive standard.

 "Veiled", her debut album, opens precisely with "It's Alright, It's Ok", which is like Leah saying to us: .

Now, the issue wasn't that Andreone had released a neither infamous nor laudable root pop-rock album as fit the times and undoubtedly her own tastes, venturing into folk, with guitar and vocals, with something ("Kiss Me Goodbye") that feels like unplugged grunge, drawing here and there from the past and her contemporaries... The problem wasn't that "You Make Me Remember" resembles Clapton's "Tears In Heaven" and that "Who Are They To Say" is a seventies rhythm and blues over the base of "La Vie En Rose" as sung by Grace Jones... The problem wasn’t even that, whatever genre she ventured into during the verses (blues, funky, root), the choruses were all the same, and it wasn’t problematic the almost absolute lack of personality (an exception that confirms the rule is "Problem Child", nearly bossa nova, with suggestive choruses mid-piece)... The problem was us. And now I'll tell you why.

Saturday night out with the girls, winter 1994, the licensed friend puts Andreone's tape in... The girls hummed in their way an inexistence English, trying to emulate Leah's vocal infantilism; they "vocalized" with conviction and hummed the easiest non-dance chorus of the nineties. Even we guys, sitting in the front, emitted that silly sound, laughing complicitly. The girlfriends had no time to respond to our provocation: they truly believed it was good singing, and it was clear that they were (disturbingly) involved. In the disco, we took turns going out as couples, getting into the car, putting the tape back on, and did what was to be done...

With the strongest track as the opener and the remaining ones to "dive into" yes, but certainly not on a Saturday night with friends around, inside and in the disco parking, what remained unheard from the tape didn't intrigue the girl, and if you used it as a simple background for your incursion into planet Venus, Leah Andreone wouldn’t distract either you or your "counterpart". I can tell you anyway that Leah wasn’t the only one, in the moments I was busy, to attempt the most surprising vocal exercises...

Returning home, we finished side B at a very low volume since the girls were sleeping and we didn’t give a damn. After dropping them off, we were alone, ready for a city raid, the last five or six red Diana cigarettes, the final breakfast, and especially the merry search for other friends and especially girlfriends... At that late hour, there was no desire to rummage among the other tapes scattered carelessly around the car, so we would put side A back on... Once the moment arrived, cigarette lit and window rolled down wide open even in the freezing cold, we neighed too, convinced as if it were normal, as if it were beautiful, without snickering, without noticing anything, and then we dived into the chorus, one beating an open hand on the steering wheel, the other on the knee.

Things that happen in moments of semi-consciousness, when you're distracted and thinking about nothing; when you’re satisfied, have everything, and couldn’t care less. Even though you know that everyone else believes in it, and you don’t.