Måneskin clean up and clock out on the tedious new album ‘Rush!’
Who will be the saviours of head-banging glam rock? Could it possibly be Måneskin, the Italian four-piece who have swept themselves into the mainstream with an appearance on the Italian version of The X Factor, a 2021 Eurovision win, and a series of global crossover hits like their version of Frankie Valli’s ‘Beggin’?
After all the Grammy nominations and opening slots with The Rolling Stones, it’s time to find out. To answer the call, Måneskin has crafted its first album as an internationally recognised rock band, Rush! The results certainly give us some insight into the group. Namely, although they are one of the biggest upstart groups in the world, they are certainly far from being the best.
Rush! is the most worrisome of modern albums: it’s so long that it’s an almost insurmountable slog to get through, but it’s so devoid of truly transcendent moments that it could all breeze by you without you even noticing. Across 17 songs, Måneskin still can’t seem to figure out what they want to be other than a generic glam rock band.
These are the kind of songs that have been fine-tuned within an inch of their respective lives. Tracks like ‘Own My Mind’, ‘Time Zone’, and ‘Baby Said’ all make sure that their choruses and guitar solos and breakdowns happen at precisely the perfect time, instantly evaporating any kind of spontaneity or diversity in their music.
It won’t be a surprise to see some of the names that pop up in the songwriting credits for those songs: Max Martin, Justin Tranter, Rami Yacoub, and Sylvester Sivertsen. All of these men are professional Exacto-knife songwriters, which means they’re really good at wrestling hooks out of songs. With most tracks topping out at less than three minutes, Rush! lives up to its name by speeding through its tracklisting without taking the time to flesh out any of its material.
Sure, ‘Gossip’ features Tom Morello and his signature siren guitar line that’s rehashed from Audioslave’s ‘Like A Stone’ (it is a really cool guitar line, to be fair), but what else distinguishes any of these songs? After burning through the entire LP, the back half especially becomes a blur of unmemorable tracks. The final three songs, ‘Mammamia’, ‘Supermodel’ and ‘The Loneliest’ are the album’s singles, but in order to get there, you have to cut through a whole bunch of nothing.
There’s nothing egregious about hiring professional songwriters or trying to game the Spotify system by stuffing as many songs onto an album as possible. There is something egregious about making it an unfun experience. Rush! isn’t lousy enough to be actively bad, but it plays out so predictably that it almost seems like a chore hearing coked-out rock song after coked-out rock song.
Truly, there’s nothing that Måneskin are doing right now that isn’t being done by bands like The Struts or The Darkness or, hell, even Queen + Adam Lambert. But just because there’s nothing new under the sun doesn’t mean that you can’t have a good time rocking to some solid repetition. If you need your music to be revolutionary, or at the very least different from hordes of other artists, then Måneskin isn’t for you. If you don’t mind some clichéd riffs and want some uptempo rock music, the door is open for you to let loose with Rush!
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