The Italian quartet Måneskin is back with quite the attitude in a mainly English-sang album, Rush!, and, yes, I do like it. Seventeen (17!) tracks are forming the sexy and wild new record.
Right, clearly, everything is a touch smoother than their first tracks, and I’ll definitely blame the crazy number of different producers implicated in the mix here. It is, overall, Pop-ier too.
Their cheekiness, style, and rhythms though are wild and crazy enough to give me goosebumps.
OWN MY MIND is quite the intro and I dived into their explosive attitude immediately without falling deeply in love with it. On the other hand, GOSSIP, with the incredibly talented Tom Morello as a guest, got me there.
After that, it’s the valley of Pop. It’s nice enough, but a lot less impressive than what I was expecting. Around the corner comes FEEL – produced by Swedish Mattman and Robin – it’s dirty, garage, electric and the layers of Pop are blending. It’s followed by DON’T WANNA SLEEP, perfect for the dance floor. The honest, raw and punk KOOL KIDS takes me aback for all the good reasons, although it seems alien in this record. Then the band eventually switch to Italian. It’s a fire, true and provocative, the one that marked me the first time.
MARK CHAPMAN, LA FINE, IL DONO DELLA VITA… these are revealing the brutal nature of the quartet. And it works beautifully for me.
Well… With this long list of producers, the band takes a lot of different directions and it’s easy to lose the plot here. It’s not completely a bad thing, but it turns them into a sort of rock-music-weathervane. I can see two distinctive albums smashed and glued together in a random manner here. With over 50 tracks created, reducing to 17 must have been quite the challenge… but maybe it’d have been worth it to reduce it to 11, turning Rush! into the explosive album the band was probably aiming for. At least, to me, the tracks produced by the band and Ferraguzzo are above the others.
Basically, Rush! is a good album that could have been better, with or without this many producers. And its Blood Record edition with its liquid-filled cover adds a little fun to it. Måneskin is on the turntable, hopefully for a long time.