REVIEW: MALIKA AYANE - "malifesto"

Five years is a long time for those who make pop, enough to be forgotten or to mature out of the spotlight.

Malika Ayane spent them mainly in Berlin, where she moved, leaving Milan. The result is called “Cicale”, the seventh studio album after “Malifesto”, released in 2021.

In Berlin he says he found slower pace and less pressure. Lately he has added Rome and Paris to the equation, a life he summarizes in an almost comical figure: five moves in six years. It is the exact opposite of the permanence that the album’s title would seem to promise.

Because the title, in fact, is a disdain for the most obvious reading of Aesop’s fable. Malika is not interested in the contrast between the carefree grasshopper and the provident ant. She is interested in the fact that the cicada spends almost all of its existence underground and then emerges, sings for a few weeks and is judged only for that song, as if everything else had never happened.

“Cicale” was born from this idea. The time spent away from the scene is not transformed into a declaration of rebirth, nor an attempt to start over. Malika returns with the tools we know, but with a different disposition towards them.

The album has friends who accompany it. In Otherwise there’s Dargen D’Amico: two parallel monologues on the same state of mind, Malika’s minimalism against the verbal density that Dargen brings wherever he sets foot. On paper it is the most tantalizing intersection of the album, while listening the two voices proceed side by side without ever deliberately touching each other.

The writing brings together consolidated collaborations and more recent additions. Pacifico and Andrea Bonomo remain important presences in the album’s architecture; A possibility bears the signature of Davide Simonetta and Paolo Antonacci, Like the first time that of Emma Nolde, in her first collaboration with Malika, while Suddenly we will laugh it is written with Ginevra, another new light of Italian music. Spring in the cityproduced by Mr. Monkey, is instead one of the few moments in which the album truly abandons its reflective pace and allows itself a more physical lightness full of bossanova echoes.

Musically, “Cicale” remains within the territory that Malika has frequented for years: adult pop, sophisticated, elegant without complacency, built on a voice that doesn’t need to force the gesture to impose itself. The arrangements work on nuances, with melodic openings that arrive without seeking effect. Melancholy occupies more space than in the past, while the idea of the dance floor remains in the background, like a possibility never completely abandoned.

The writing also seems less interested in hiding behind elegance. Malika talks about a woman who has stopped asking for permission to live her life and does so with a more direct, less coded language than that of some of her previous production.

Some songs seem to dialogue with a musical memory that belongs to Malika herself. In Finally some passages continue ideally Now and here (nostalgic present)a song that carries eleven years on its shoulders: the same urgency, moved forward in time, with less need to prove something. In Otherwise echoes emerge that can bring back memories Destination Paradise by Gianluca Grignani, especially in the emotional construction of the melody. Like the first time evokes instead Shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, more for the melodic flow than for a recognizable quote. These are combinations that also belong to my listening perception, rather than necessarily declared references.

The real novelty of “Cicale“ it is therefore not in the form. Malika doesn’t need to reinvent her vocabulary to say that something has changed. Rather, the distance from which he looks at that vocabulary has changed. After five years of recording absence, the return does not force a new identity and does not pursue the need to prove something: he accepts the time that has passed and lets it enter the songs.

“Cicadas” it’s not yet the album of reinvention. It’s a very good album. A record where you feel that singing still really matters to Malika Ayane.

TRACK BY TRACK

finally: it’s too early now to write my version of my way and too late to abandon oneself to Scarlett O’hara’s reckless optimism.
I try to be critical without judging, wander without getting lost. I don’t try to have the last word – otherwise, what’s left? – but to put periods where needed, both on the i’s and at the end of a sentence, so that they are. ? or !

nocturnal animals: it’s a perfect song to listen to in the car and wherever there is the possibility of shrugging. It talks about mature love, the beauty of being able to choose, all told with a series of suggestions that give the idea of the dynamism of the world and of life. Who are nocturnal animals? it’s all of us. the night is a time when many people have fun but just as many work. it’s simply a part of the day that you see less of. it is a piece designed to offer, every time, a sound element to rediscover, like a beautiful fabric or a beautiful landscape.

it went like this: while keeping in mind that we are the sum of our choices, our poorly managed dreams and creatively processed traumas, and that we learn along the way, the moment will never come when we will know exactly what to do and how to do it. We will never know if we are ready. rather, very often it will be an excess of confidence that makes us make the mistake so banal that it makes us feel like decidedly low-cost Icarus. However, it’s not over until it’s over. Maybe it’s very late but it’s not yet.

suddenly we will laugh: It’s a song about emotion. Given the choice, I have always preferred to try to describe it rather than trying to rationalize it at any cost. Like those who prefer to let the symptoms vent instead of bringing down the fever to the first degree above the ideal temperature. This is why we have two verses with different scenarios, feelings and attitudes, which however converge in the same solution – that of the chorus – that is, observe, recognize what you feel and let yourself be carried, without judgement. The special aims to be a sort of climax and is therefore deliberately a tangle of voices without text.

otherwise: The center of this song is in the last phrase of the chorus: “Moving home again is not enough to live differently”. Already from the first draft I felt that there was a rare intensity, but I also felt that something important was missing to complete this story about the desire to change, to change oneself and the enormous difficulty of being able to persevere in the process. I asked Dargen to intervene because I know his immense sensitivity and his lucid and sharp pen. In fact, not only did he hit the theme perfectly, but he built a parallel story that moves straight and piercingly, while mine torments itself like water inside the vortex.

said between us: summarizes the gray of the winter sea, the reflection of the dawn lights on sequins that danced all night, the inevitable thought of “then” every time something new begins. “between us” is the lucid melancholy typical of adulthood which when we are in good health we call ‘awareness’ and which on less brilliant days becomes ‘wisdom’. It is the shadow that is projected on things but which does not darken them because the gaze on them is given with a sense of reality and with trust but without disturbing expectations. as far as lyrics and music are concerned, I like that listening evokes a possible interpretation. what interested me more than anything else is that the emotional suggestions were strong and the text clear

likely: it’s a love song. It’s a song about the beginning of a love that comes unexpectedly and at a moment in life where you know that, if someone tells you that you are special, you have two options: the first is to run away as quickly as possible; the second – which does not exclude the first – is to provide the declarant with a rather good therapist. It’s a love song that tells of the moment in which you haven’t yet become numb because of the hormones – in the arrangement represented by the strings – and you can clearly see the possibilities that everything could work out or not, but that it will almost never be due to a lack of love, as long as the love consists, as my therapist – who is also very good – said, what Valéry said: “love consists in wanting to say more”

like the first time: then it is said StillAnd StillAnd Still. Except that, suddenly – and not even too suddenly – we realize that, however Still it’s wonderful, new he is feverish.
Rational and evolved is knowing that the new has a natural expiration. Extraordinary is not being forced to consider Still something to be preserved from a purely rational and conservative point of view. The desire to live is extraordinary the anchor as if it were something newas if the two who speak to each other in this passage were those two gods Silence for dinner from ten years ago and who, if you look closely, are not silent out of tiredness – at least not now – but because they are studying a new way to say again, again, again.

one possibility: cIt’s a type of song that has always fascinated me: “the fake happy song”, the one in which a more or less bitter text is associated with a world of sound which, due to its rhythm, melody and harmony, instead evokes a more carefree attitude. “a possibility” wants to be one of these. As a great fan of sarcastic comedies, I found irresistible the idea of creating a song that was light-hearted in telling how often the image of happiness that comes from the outside, from holiday postcards for example, is not universal but rather sometimes turns out to be a trap into which one falls because, by trying to forcibly adhere to a model, by trying to adapt to a form that is not one’s own, one loses sight of the authentic pleasure of living or the experimentation which also includes the part in which an error of evaluation or a blunder are to be considered as an eventuality of life and not as a tragedy from a musical point of view, we chose sounds that evoked songs from the past with the same characteristics so as to obtain a cocktail of summer, nostalgia, alienation, wise irony.

spring in the city: it is a divertissement, a joy. It’s me who comes back from yet another trip and smokes a cigarette sitting like a cat at the window of my house and, spying a little in the apartments opposite, a little on the sidewalk of the street, I wait for the sun to finally go down a little later.

SCORE: 8.00

TO LISTEN NOW

maybe the only one I would skip is a possibility. I didn’t like it!

TRACKLIST:

finally
nocturnal animals
that’s how it went”
suddenly we will laugh
differently” ft Dargen D’Amico
between us
likely
like the first time
a possibility
spring in the city