Måneskin, a rock cramp for those who did not live its golden age

The Italian group responds to the expectations created after their Eurovision success with an overwhelming album, somewhat overwrought, in which they give a new and desperate life to rock clichés

What’s astonishing is not that Måneskin racked up flurries of twelve points at Eurovision (in 2021), but that his fame hasn’t waned sharply since then, following the fate of so many other festival winners in its modern era. Who remembers those who emerged as winners in most of the recent editions?

Something will have this group of Rome so that, past its ‘momentum’, keep the pull and multiply itget along with the Stones and Iggy Pop, and get ready to offer, in a city like Barcelona, a spectacular double of concerts (Palau Sant Jordi, sold out, and Primavera Sound). And all this, while the bells ring for his alleged death of rock. It is in this crazy context that Måneskin moves, a group that invoices, precisely, rock for those who did not live its golden age, and who handles his most gimmicky clichés as if they were modern commercial pop. That attention to hooks, crisp production, and compositional brevity: eight of the 17 songs on ‘Rush!’, their third albumThey don’t even make it to three minutes.

Gag Accumulation

This is a overwhelming songbookwhere English mostly replaces Italian, and in which Måneskin tries to leave us stiff with each verse and with each tune, transmitting some overexcitement. The band is assisted by producers who know everything about the ‘mainstream’, such as Rami Yacoub and Max Martin (the latter began in glam-funk-metal with the Swedish group It’s Alive, back in the 90s), and all this has come out a fast-paced work Whose risk is ending up exhausting you by their accumulation of gags designed to get your attention.

Måneskin moves between the unwrapped hard rock (with guest guitar from Tom Morello, by Rage Against the Machine, in ‘Gossip’) and the glam cadence of ‘Read your diary’, the hint of metal darkness of ‘Gasoline’ and the edge-‘funky’ trot with nervous borders a la Franz Ferdinand of ‘Baby said’. Some insistence on the obsessive chorus, becoming a brand of the group, from ‘Don’t wanna sleep’ to ‘Bla bla bla’. In this, the singer, damiano david, he gets (still) a little cooler than usual: “You said I’m ugly and my band sucks / But I have a song with a billion streams / Kiss my ass! & rdquor ;. This is rock’n’roll, listen up.

And Måneskin emerges with flying colors from packaging an album of guitars, bass and drums for an era where there is room for the triumph of the unpredictable. He DJs a bit in the ballads section (along the sleazy side), and he leaves you on top by moving the first three singles from the album to the bottom of the tracklist. And after all, if as an adult you end up seeing it as an example of rock engulfing by the system, it’s because perhaps you’ve been a bit clueless for 40 years.

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