Review: LEVANTE - "Failure of love and other dance steps"

With “Of Love, Failure and Other Dance Steps”, Levante transforms his own fragilities into an autobiographical investigation into love, separations and the need to find oneself.

Levante dances in a choreography made up of falls, awareness and restarts, between the need to find himself and the pain of a comparison left pending

It would be banal and predictable to make a record about ideal, theoretical, textbook love. Usually, however, this is what is expected from those who have the gift of knowing how to translate emotions into music. Less obvious, however, would be to expose a true and autobiographical feeling with the risk of conveying the image of a person who is perhaps still emotionally immature and chaotic. Not wrong, but can be wrong. And this is where it comes Levant.

To title her new album, the singer-songwriter uses two words that don’t go well together at all: “love” and “failure”. Levante feels them to the point of avoiding the most comfortable path, which is to talk about them in a totally abstract way. Instead he chooses to tell his story, to open the doors to a retrospective reflection, a profound investigation, at times painful, uncomfortable and imperfect but undoubtedly real. Where, however, there is also room for dancing.

Claudia Lagona aka Levante has gone through many moments in her life: she played with her image, she sang several times, and well, on the Sanremo stage, she gave life to Alma Futura, she exposed herself, she bluntly told that one can be a mother without being perfect and even without always being happy about it. A truth that is often silenced, in a world too accustomed to thinking that motherhood should be all-encompassing.

With the sincerity of when he recounted that moment, with “Dell’Amore il Faimento e Altri Passi di Danza” Levante trains himself to put the movements together with the patience and wealth of someone who knows that arriving at a choreography takes time, because even falling is part of that process. This is why Levante’s love is a dance in which the solo has often prevailed: the need to remain anchored to oneself and not get lost in the other’s space, the need to work deeply on coordination to finally find synchronicity.

To better understand “Love, Failure and Other Dance Steps”, there are three absolutely non-negligible moments. The first is the architrave that supports the entire work, which is precisely the title of the album, of the first song and its opening verse. There is no intermediate step that makes the impact softer. Having opened the curtain on the tracklist, from the exploration of love in its most complex phases – the end, the distance, the silence, the difficulty of being honest, even the digital drifts of recent years – comes a surprise: a song full of poetry and tenderness that holds the two halves of the album together and contains the naive and at the same time disarming acuity of children: “I don’t want to make a mess of pranks inside you. But when we’re together everything starts all over again.”

Through Alma’s voice we arrive at the most light-hearted part of the album where Levante looks at life with his ironic and amused manner, before arriving at the closing: a poignant letter of forgiveness and love, the reckoning, the understanding and acceptance of an anger that has roots: in “Abissale” Levante turns to her father, who passed away when she was very little, with the prayer to return to free herself from the sometimes severe figure and show her how not to kill love.

TO LISTEN NOW

Of Love the Failure – I am Blue – Abysmal

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

Sei Tu (already heard extensively in Sanremo)

SCORE: 7.00

TRACKLIST

The failure of love
Nothing to say
Rust
It’s you
Arcana
Blood Moon
I’m blue
My fire
Mischief
Cheerfulness
Never never
Malia
Sorry Boy
Madly
Punishment
Abysmal

DISCOGRAPHY

2014 – Destruction manual
2015 – Take care of yourself
2017 – In the chaos of astonishing rooms
2019 – Magmamemory
2023 – Future work
2026 – Love’s failure and other dance steps