JOAN THIELE - Joanita

Lucio Corsi was an emblematic case of an artist who, thanks to the Sanremo Festival, was able to make himself known and appreciated by a mainstream, cross-generational and wide-ranging audience. The sharpest-eared members of that immense audience might also have picked up on, standing out amid plenty of filler, the singer-songwriter pop-rock on offer from Joan Thiele, who has now released this "Joanita".

It's not a debut - if anything, "Tango" (2018) deserves to be rediscovered for its sophisticated, cosmopolitan pop, laced with r'n'b, soul and electronic injections. This post-Sanremo album, her first entirely in Italian, is more tied to an idea of pop and rock songwriting, albeit filtered through decades of reinterpretations and hybridizations as well as a world of film scores. "Joanita" represents a journey into the singer's roots and influences, with tracks ranging from pop-rap and urban rhythms to more ethereal, often vintage melodies, and Latin touches that nod to her Colombian origins.

Opened by the impalpable melancholy of "La forma liquida", a slowed-down chamber pop piece, the album plays with noir tones in the pop sound torn open by the reverb-drenched electric guitars of "Veleno", and converses with a jazz-rap beat on "Bacio sulla fronte", complete with smoky horns, a hypnotic voice and Middle Eastern echoes.

What we're hearing, then, is a deeply personal synthesis: very different elements held together by the voice and performance of the artist herself, from the unsettling melody of the evocative sixties-style homage "Tramonto" to the slightly distorted hallucination of "Acqua blu", all the way to the more immediate Sanremo moment "Eco", a refined, melancholy pop song, once again adorned with guitar and not without a nod to "Goodnight Moon" by Shivaree. It even lends itself to a deliciously sweet acoustic song like "L'invisibile", which links her to Brazilian music.

The duet "Occhi da gangster" (feat. Frah Quintale) deserves a separate mention: it sounds like it's straight out of a James Bond film and contains a nod to Piero Umiliani.

After the orchestral arrangement of the trip-hop of "Volto di donna", the closing honors go to the Neapolitan-language song "Pazzerella", sung by a different voice (her mother?) with no musical accompaniment whatsoever: it's a way of bringing a domestic, nostalgic, intimate mood to the end of an almost eponymous album, one that shows us a singer-songwriter more ready than ever to begin a second musical life. The whole of Italy has become aware of the existence, and the worth, of Lucio Corsi. Let's hope the same enthusiasm can bring the attention she deserves to Joan Thiele as well.

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23/02/2025