If I had to choose the moment in which Angelina Mango seemed to me something more than the singer of “come se-, come se-, come sere d'estate”, no longer the favorite of the noisy audience of Friends but one that went beyond the confines of the cuteness that poisons Italian pop, I'd say it was about forty seconds after the first appearance in Sanremo. That is, it was when she intoned the melodic part of Boredom, the Rosalía-style existential-pop song that begins with “I die without dying”. There it seemed to me that there was at least potentially something different, more intense.
In many passages of Poké Melodrama Angelina Mango's voice has that same unruly and unurban note, even vulgar, and therefore it sounds good, alive, real. It's not stuff you bring out on command, you have it or you don't, most Italian pop singers don't have it. What bothers many about Mango is also her beauty, her desire to be brazenly pop and to do so without measure or grace. He throws it in your face. Even with his limitations, and there are some, in his beautiful confusion Poké Melodrama it gives us a glimpse of the possibility that Italian pop can be made in a slightly different way than usual, that every now and then talents like her emerge to whom the Lord of records (cit. Skiantos) grants some good songs, not all but some yes.
Until yesterday she had released a few singles, her debut EP as a singer-songwriter with immature writing Studio flat and the aspiring pop star that he is Will to live, full of modest songs and production. This is her first real album and it is on another level despite it getting lost a little towards the end and despite the banality of certain lyrics. One of the nice things about Poké Melodrama it is her revealing herself, song after song, a danceable coming-of-age novel, a colorful autobiography, never irritating, intense, just the right amount of a girl who grew up in Lagonegro, in Basilicata, with a father who died when she was 13, a brother with whom she could imagine being in Chronicles of Narnia, the messes in the head typical of teenagers, a life to understand and invent. And that all this is expressed with a voice original enough to resist at least a little the homologation that all Italian pop singers who want to carve out a slice of the Spotify pie face.
Poké Melodrama it's not perfect, but it's perfect for this album-playlist era. It is written by nearly 30 authors, including Mango, and packaged by 11 producers. It is varied and in fact it is called this because «like a poké it brings together many ingredients, it is heterogeneous, it goes in all directions and this is because when I enter the studio I never have a goal, I let the music take me everywhere and therefore the the only way to be coherent was to be inconsistent” in stylistic choices.
More than poké I appreciate melodrama (but with a hint of irony, “melodrama less drama”), or rather, the popular intensity of certain interpretations. «I sing like I speak», Angelina tells me when I meet her briefly a week before the album's release and that's fine, especially if the emphasis is counterbalanced by choppy musical structures like that of Family jewels or by the whimsical vocal punctuation of A nice song, written and produced with Okgiorgio. There are also four feats, an endemic disease of Italian pop. Marco Mengoni plays his part and does it well in the duet Same as me, Bresh works in a piece a well-known thread that seems recorded live in the studio, vocals, guitar and bass. Dani Faiv and VillaBanks are present in the second part in two modest songs from which Angelina's talent comes out normalized and aligned with today's productions. If we had pushed the accelerator in the search for a more original sound by adding a couple of less pieces, Poké Melodrama it would have been better than it is.
In songs like Boredom, Melodrama or Crush the sounds emerge that Angelina calls «material, I don't know how to explain it to you, those that you listen to and can almost see, like when to make a rhythm we used the sound of a motorbike chain on a pan or to Melodrama I shook a package of pasta. The studio is a playground.” It's the folk part, let's call it. It is of course a geo-delocalized folk, a kind of imaginary and globalized folk, like a playground, where the waters of the Caribbean bathe the Middle East, it is the folk of everywhere. It does not come, Angelina assures, from admiration for Rosalía or from other references which certainly were taken into consideration when making the album. Mango does not have a strong tradition in which to recognize itself, to study, to modernize like flamenco for Spanish. «This thing» she tells me «comes from my personal taste, from the Mediterranean sounds, from the place where I grew up, from the tarantellas I heard at street parties».
Ask her how she got there starting from her bedroom songs Studio flat and he will tell you that «I have learned to listen to others, even to steal from others, which I have done in the last year by going to the studio and doing many sessions, learning things on a technical-musical level because everything I do, I do it self-taught, by ear.” This, it seems, should not make us underestimate the mark that she left on the album of which she is the artistic director with Giovanni Pallotti. «In the studio I'm a pain in the ass, my musicians hate me, but this thing is fundamental. I write melodies, lyrics, songs alone and with others. I was present in all phases, from the writing to the arrangements and the choice of sounds and musicians.”
In case you're wondering if he sings about his father, the answer is yes, of course. I remember back in the day Studio flat the caution with which one was asked to approach the topic. Understandable, you are the daughter of an artist (double, since your mother is Laura Valente) and you would like to make your way for who you are, not for what your parents have done. Perhaps because Pino Mango is not a cumbersome character like De André, Angelina immediately managed not only to free herself from him, but to have a healthy relationship with her surname.
He sang in Sanremo The swallowone of the most intense moments of the festival and it's not on the album, it would have been a nice ending instead Another World. However, he approaches the topic by explaining (or rather, singing, because “I can't speak very well so I'll play”) that family stories can suffocate you like family jewels that get caught around your neck. In Edmund and Lucya melodrama for piano and broken voice set to music with his brother, he sings in a dramatic crescendo about the “too little time” spent with his father, in Single file she takes it out on those who “look for poison in the garbage outside the door of our house” and “only find 400 butts of guests busy hugging mom” after her husband's death.
From this poké of things and music, of trendy Rosalía pieces and others from traditional singer-songwriters, from this mix of street party and international aspirations, of exciting moments and forgettable songs, the restless character of the twenty-three-year-old who likes to let loose in danceable songs with very pop lyrics-slogans in which you move in the blink of an eye from the trauma in progress to the post-adolescent thought about love. Certain euphoric moments have something childish about them and I don't think it's a coincidence and I don't think it's a bad thing. Poké Melodrama it's the album of someone who's in no hurry to grow up. At that age she has the unbridled vitality and irrational joy that, I realize, can keep the over-somethings away. Edmund and Lucy, or Angelina and her brother Filippo, are children. She is a little girl the protagonist of Melodrama who dances in the living room at home and seeks his way. So is the six-year-old Smile who one day approached the singer and told her candidly “do you know that my father is also in the sky like yours?”.
Behind the crowd of authors and producers, the carefully constructed aesthetic and the fame of the greatest rising talent of our pop, it seems to me there is a beautiful thing and that is the strangeness and therefore the uniqueness of Angelina. The more it comes out, the more Poké Melodrama works. Think about it, the best music is rarely made by those who were the most popular in school, the most interesting guys are never the ones you consider perfect, they are instead the ones who have to deal with something. She says this album represents her perfectly. I believe, I want to believe that she is bigger than this record, her totalthe album partial.
And then there's the cover. If it is true, as it is true, that on stage and in videos his music also passes through his body, it means that it passes through his appearance, his beauty and his imperfections, the shameless way of presenting himself which is subjected to judgment of people and that some find intriguing and others repelling. It's true that Angelina knows how to make herself loved, but to understand the reactions she arouses, just open her Instagram profile and read certain gratuitous and denigrating comments that cry out for revenge. It seems to me that underlying the album there is also this theme, the irreducible diversity which I hope will remain so.
«The problem» Angelina tells me «is that artists go looking for bad comments, I've done it too and it doesn't do me any good, but the judgment I'm afraid of is my own». And in fact it took her a while to make sure. He fights this in a counterintuitive way: «The more I don't like myself, the more I start dancing in culottes in videos. It's shock therapy. I like everything to be seen, even imperfection, both when I write and when I show myself. I don't like some of my fragilities, for example the fact that I am very dependent on affection or the fear of becoming an adult. I put them in the songs because everything needs to be told to the public, I feel it is a duty. And if I don't like something about my body,” she says, picking up a postcard with the album cover, “instead of hiding it, I show it. Because it's good for me and for people who feel imperfect like me.”
Today pop is also this stuff and Angelina Mango was born to do it. Now comes the difficult part: starting from the best parts of this album, enhancing its otherness with the choices, the care, the songs, the musical thought, the sensitivity, the imagination. And don't give in to the desire to be like everyone else.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM