Album: Måneskin - Rush!

Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times.

They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a fast-paced, 17-track biggie, drawing on the gloriously stupid, disruptive, inverse fuck-it spirit of rock n roll as we used to know it in all its awful majesty, sporting make-up, big boots and a three-minute attention span, augmented by the pile-on spirit of punk and stomping disco where an uncaged hybrid of The Fall meets Lady Gaga inside the bass drum of a Glitter rock covers band.

Måneskin are singer Damiano David, bassist Victoria De Angelis, guitarist Thomas Raggi and drummer Ethan Torchio, larger-than-life beings breaking out their rock'n'roll Instagram poses to descend to the stage and set the music alight with a fuck-it attitude that has largely been missing in action for what feels like a long time.

The stomping lock-in of bass and drums is often the lead actor in the short, sharp songs (mostly sung in English) that fuel Rush!, high-kicking from the off with “Own My Mind’s” propulsive beat bedecked with a distorted Iggy-like vocal and lean scrawls of guitar. The following “Gossip” (with a guest turn from Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello) is a punk-pop stomp, easier to binge on than kebabs at closing time, its needling synth and metal guitar solo adding dollops of tangy, hot sauce over the top. Love song “Timezone” is a power ballad power-tooled up with rumbling bass, stomping bass drum, squiggly guitar lines and a shouty, join-in chorus, while the ebullient “Blah Blah Blah” is stripped right down to vocals, bass and drums, its funny, acerbic, fuck-you lyrics wrapping themselves round the simplest of descending guitar lines that stalk the song like the undead spirit of glitter-rock.

Closing songs “Mammamia”, the more conventional rock-n-roll “Supermodel” and power balladry of “The Loneliest” have all ratcheted up big streaming audiences, but neither match the humour, energy, excess and musical aggression of songs like “Kool Kids” and its fellow disrupters on this entertaining, energetic and effervescing album. Rock is dead, they say; not when its dolled up, strung out and dancing to Måneskin.

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