Carmen Consoli - Mediamente Isterica (1998)

In her previous two albums, Due Parole and Confusa e Felice, Carmen Consoli showed herself to be a thoughtful singer who, though she was certainly willing call out angrily at things that bothered her, seemed more comfortable expressing a kind of quiet sentimentality. And while her third studio album, Mediamente Isterica, still contains many of those gentler moments, she also seems to have gotten a lot angrier, and a lot more brazen, in the year that passed between releases. Yes, "Quattordici Luglio" is sweet and lovely, with its late-'90s simple guitar riffs layered over one another, but it's a near rarity in comparison to the exploding chords and yelps that pepper the other tracks on the record. Consoli's about irony here, about contrast, and so while a piece might start benignly enough, her true opinions and attentions are eventually shown, either lyrically or musically. "Sentivo l'Odore" begins with effected guitars and a sparse bass-and-drum line and ends with yelling, "Anello Mancante," despite its soft and pretty acoustic guitar, speaks bitterly of her own ignorance, while "Eco di Sirene" moves from eerie processed guitars to a full-out power pop chorus about the dueling natures of victory and ruin. However, the singer likes to tread the boundaries of ambiguity, as well, landing somewhere between pleasure and pain on the darkly rolling and sexual "Geisha," and skirting ideas of betrayal and redemption in the jangly "Bésame Giuda"/"Bésame Mucho" combo. Nothing's too obtuse to follow or understand, but it's not clearly laid out and described in simply rhymed platitudes, either. Consoli makes her listeners think without losing them in the process, and while still entertaining them, and though Mediamente Isterica doesn't explore the more advanced musical or lyrical territory that would come to define her later albums, choosing to stay cleanly on the electric guitar-driven alternative path instead, it's a notable achievement nonetheless.