Virginiana Miller
Italiamobile

"Italiamobile" is the second album by Virginiana Miller. It was released in 1999, three years after the first, "Gelaterie sconsacrate", which was beautiful and highly acclaimed. It seems that after a good debut album, everyone is waiting in the wings to deliver a fatal blow if you don't live up to expectations. However, Virginiana Miller hit the mark again, delivering a masterstroke. They succeeded in making a different album while remaining true to themselves. The themes of lost adolescence are now (almost) surpassed, and the group crafts an album with extraordinary elegance that is practically perfect. It appears decidedly darker, more mature, and more complex than the first, yet it retains its usual sharp irony in some episodes.

The melodic construction of the songs, which was already surprising and never trite in the debut album, becomes more challenging here, so the number of listens needed to reach complete understanding increases significantly. Simone Lenzi's lyrics, always refined and profound, at times take on an almost painful tone. The group's sound is more mature and polished but hasn't lost its power in the necessary moments, and the singer-songwriter roots are still perfectly evident. The theme of the difficulty in communicating with those in front of you, as well as with the rest of the world, recurs in several tracks; "ti ho chiamata ma tu, in un intenso traffico sei, il cliente al momento non raggiungibile…" reads the lyrics of the title track Italiamobile, and said like this, it seems trivial, a banal game, but within the song hides a strange suffering, a desperate search for communication "volevo chiederti soltanto come stai, come ti trovi, comunicarti che mi sono perso... in un’italiamobile" , ends up shouting Simone Lenzi. But within the album, there is much more, like, inevitably, misunderstood love that ends badly (very badly) and the difficulty of growing peacefully as an ordinary person, which brings back a bit to the adolescent and melancholic themes of their beginnings. However, there are still funny and ironic episodes like the track "silenzio ospedale", a love story between two hospitalized patients consumed inside a hospital with all that follows. In any case, the most enveloping and convincing tracks of Italiamobile remain the more serious and adult ones. I want to mention "Placenta," "Cerbero," "Radioamatore," "Pacemaker," and "Bentivegna," songs of a compositional and literary level that is not easy to find often in Italy and that especially give Virginiana Miller such a unique imprint, a brand that convinces me there are few parallels with other artists in our country.

Virginiana Miller have built their own style, an imaginary world in which to let themselves slip away for a while. NOTE: I also want to emphasize the fact that these guys do not have exaggerated attitudes, like arrogant stars or bored intellectuals of the world. I met them after a concert in Rome and stopped to chat with them. I got the impression of being with calm, normal, and pleasant people. Great availability and sympathy.