LEVANTE - Dell’amore il fallimento e altri passi di danza

I no longer ask myself what love is, or where it goes when it ends

Levante opens her reflections on her new album, “Dell’amore il fallimento e altri passi di danza”, with these words: it's her sixth record in a career that began twelve years ago with “Manuale distruzione”, the debut that slowly brought her to prominence within Italy's sprawling indie scene.
A lot has happened since those songs, written with the genuine spark of a singer-songwriter still green but already full of character. Claudia Lagona has in fact reinvented herself in parallel as a novelist, after essentially flopping on TV as a judge on X Factor, without ever displaying much narrative flair — if anything, her books ended up delivering an avoidable brand of introspective snobbery. Meanwhile, on social media, her influencer ambitions collided with a few ill-judged remarks and bouts of wounded-matron silence. What exactly she was wounded by has never quite been clear. All the way up to her three appearances at the Sanremo Festival, promising on paper but disappointing in substance — and in the numbers and rankings too — starting with her most recent appearance with the unbearable “Sei tu”, a ballad about as watered-down as the Ariston's most tired, overused melodic turns can get.

In short, the Sicilian musician has done everything she can to shatter much of what was good about what she presented and sang on her first two albums, turning herself into a singer-songwriter who is at times depressive and, let's be honest, also vaguely irascible, forever a step away from a private oblivion that, deep down, interests no one — especially in times that are already generally trying enough for everyone.

After the dreadful “Opera Futura”, as muddled and thematically ponderous as a wait at the dentist's, Levante tries again with sixteen songs aiming, first and foremost, to climb back up the charts, blending in disco pulses here and there — the same ones, to be clear, that Annalisa has rolled out in nearly all her hit singles in recent years — alongside a narrative that once again traffics in psychodrama.
"I've only kept insistently asking myself why I made it fail, every time it failed or never even started. Linking failure to dance came from imagining these stories as duets, quadrilles, group dances. Isn't that, in the end, what it is? Finding yourself making the same old moves again," she says. And further: "In writing and composing the songs on this album, I wasn't guided by a colour, at least not right away. As the months went by, I understood that it was an orange light flashing over my words, like a warning traffic light, a life preserver in the middle of the sea, a life jacket. Orange really is an emblem of detention, warning or protection. It's the colour of ascent, descent and solar combustion, a symbol of ripening and harvest, of the rust-coloured autumn moon, of assimilation and fulfilment."

As if that weren't enough, having also set aside the chromatic metaphor, Levante reappeared exactly a year ago with "Niente da dire", a single that gave real cause for hope — elusive in melody at times, with an eager chorus and lyrics far from brimming with the usual romantic rhetoric. It turned out, however, to be a bluff, or rather a mirage, since already with "Dell'amore il fallimento", the track that opens the LP, things get decidedly worse, between "uh-uh-uh"s splattered over a tune sung almost a cappella, and an eighties beat overused to death by just about everyone, whether on the Ariston stage or elsewhere, in recent years. Things certainly go a bit better with the post-punk(!) bass driving the ballad "Ruggine", a shame that in the refrain everything slides into a vacuum, with a confession of supposed humility at the centre of yet another relationship drama.   

The main problem with an album like “Dell’amore il fallimento e altri passi di danza” is its carefully calculated alternation between utterly harmless little love-lost ditties and tracks that are needlessly more upbeat, like the single "Sono blu", yet another self-absorbed raising of the stakes, full of "pain wrapped inside a lie" (yes, sadly, that's the level we're talking about) that keep repeating the same formula. You could call it a female version of Cesare Cremonini, another artist who, to put it mildly, tends to melodically plagiarise himself rather often.
It's pop, some would say. And on paper that would even be fine, if only, behind all this shouting at itself, the eardrums didn't end up begging for at least the slower moments, like "Fuoco mio", several of which Levante handles admirably in the end, notwithstanding vocals that always aim to soar above the clouds regardless.
"Love me beyond the world / It's never the end" is another line worth quoting, just to underline once again the "depth" of the novelist on loan to pop, or the singer-songwriter on loan to literature: at this point, one starts to wonder. Though it's a question that goes nowhere fast, given the average quality of the lyrics and, alas, of the songs.  

Between one dance step and one banal guitar riff after another, things proceed more or less briskly, hoping some genuinely gripping spark will arrive. And "Allegria" does manage to "surprise" a little. It's no coincidence, after all, that it's the only song in the bunch to pick up the spirit of "Niente da dire". Then there's "Malìa", a sort of pop music box fused with an electro folk flavour that also works, making it the album's third standout.
Between multicoloured disco escapes ("Sorry Boy") seasoned with a chorus that's always the same as all the others, or nearly so, and piano ballads sung to crumble to pieces by ("Castigo"), Levante closes her most ambitious work with "Abissale", letting herself be carried off by an orchestral epic quality that measures just how much good could still be found in this singer-songwriter who, despite everything, still seems deep down unsure of her own potential — too wrapped up in the need to amaze and do things on a grand scale, when, all things considered, she'd be better served by subtracting, doing less, but better.

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15/10/2026