Loredana Berté more anarchic, rebellious and overwhelming than ever

September 28, 2018 Loredana Berté returned to release a new album after thirteen years: “Freedom”. In true Berté style he presented the album by declaring: “I claim my right to freedom and madness. To diversity and the right to say what I want.” The following is our review of the album which a few months later, in February 2019, returned to the market again in the form of “Sanremo edition” (read the review here) which compared to the original features the addition of the song sung at the Sanremo festival “What do you want from me” and two live medleys.

Loredana Berté returns with a new album of unreleased songs after thirteen years, more anarchic, rebellious and overwhelming than ever. It is called “LiBerté” and it is a disco-manifesto that talks about the woman before the artist: her dark sides, her demons and the invisible walls that surround her. Without filters and without brakes, psychologically free from any censorship (on the album cover she tries to take off a straitjacket), the voice of “Non sono una donna” removes a few pebbles from her shoe and lets it out with this handful of new songs all his anger.

“LiBerté” is a particularly inspired record.

It is a diary that smacks of sleepless nights, bad thoughts, disappointments and disillusions, on which in these years of recording silence and absence from the scene Loredana Berté has jotted down her reflections and her daily anger. Rather than relying on other pens, she wanted to write the lyrics herself (but some authors helped her to do some order – including Fabio Ilacqua, Davide Simonetta and Maurizio Piccoli): it was her way of letting off steam , to exorcise anger and bitterness. It’s a river in flood, and you can already understand it from the first song, the one that gives the title to the entire album: it says that it doesn’t stay among the hymns and flags, among the sheep in procession, that its only vocation is to be alone a loose dog. She says she doesn’t follow pack rules and that if you knock on her door, she won’t be found. Just for the sake of making you stay there, stuck like an idiot, waiting (in vain) for him to open up.

Loredana has a bit of a grudge against everyone: friends lost along the way, those who promise and then don’t keep them, the good professionals. He also has it with God, because “that cursed night in ’95, when Mimì died”, he cheated against himself, as he sings in “Anima Carbone”, one of the most bitter and intense songs on the album.

Luca Chiaravalli, now specialized in relaunching the careers of artists who for one reason or another ended up in the shadows (see Stadio and Paola Turci), helped her transform anger and energy into hard, sharp and angular sounds , which go well with the raw atmospheres of the lyrics.

“LiBerté” is a rock and roll album, raw, brazen and spartan: songs like “Message from the moon”, which sees Berté return to singing words by Ivano Fossati (already the author, for her, of unforgettable manifestos like “Dedicato” and “I’m not a lady”), “A woman like me” (among the authors there is Gaetano Curreri), “Tutti in cielo” or “Babilonia” (which seems like a “Folle città” 2.0: “The sirens / the sheet metal of the city / the acid in the veins / for an hour of freedom”) demonstrate that Loredana is still the lioness of Italian rock. And that when it roars there really isn’t any for anyone.

All these years of recording silence and exclusion seemed to have made Loredana Berté an old glory of Italian music: iconic, sure, but old glory nonetheless. This album, however, which arrives two years after the project “Amici non ho ne… Ma amiche si” (even if it made some people turn up their noses, it served to bring the queen back to the throne), shows that Berté still has many things to say, that he is not satisfied with being an icon to be venerated. And if she looks back, she does it without regrets and without nostalgia: only to tell how the past has made her the woman of today. Simply, Loredana Berté.