Rush!

Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.

With 17 mostly terrific songs (three sung in Italian), only one breaking the four-minute mark, the collection has the jittery intensity of a lion pacing before feeding time. ... Perhaps we could have done without the closing power ballad “The Loneliest,” but that’s the only misstep on an album that should thrust this band into worldwide superstar status.

With Rush!, Måneskin make good on their Eurovision rock promise, delivering an album that's campy, inspired, and thrilling all at the same time.

Pop uber-producer Max Martin is somewhat inevitably on hand to make sure the album gleams even harder than this sharp, lurid foursome do on their own. Unfortunately, Rush! is also a record that dashes about trying to tick all the boxes, with Måneskin’s English-language songs far outnumbering the Italian ones.

A miserable buffet of rock ‘n’ roll cliches, from saccharine ballads to off-color glam to bland MTV rock. It’s essentially homeopathic rock muzak.

Måneskin are a band who know what they are and what they’re good at – because while it’s true that Rush! starts to feel amorphous, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single moment in its 50-minute runtime where you’re not enjoying yourself just a little.

This is Måneskin’s big strength. The songs on RUSH! may not be particularly original, reading heavily from a well-thumbed big-riffs-and-god-times playbook, but they write a very good one, and play them with an energy that frequently boils over with exuberance.

The band's signature swagger and theatricality is present throughout, but there are moments of vulnerability and lamentation that add depth in all the right places.

Unsurprisingly, it’s overcooked in places. In addition to super-producer Max Martin (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry), an array of producers come and go on the 17-track record that nearly stretches to a full hour. ... But little could possibly dampen the record’s spirit and spunk.

Exhaustive and exhausting, ‘Rush!’ feels like the definitive word in this unlikely rock phenomenon – at its best, it’s a feral reminder of how entertaining the genre can be.

What Rush! lacks in heft – a couple of glancing lyrical references to sexuality and gender notwithstanding, not even Måneskin’s loudest cheerleader is going to claim it as a weighty album – it makes up for in enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm occasionally tips over into a cloying eagerness to please (Supermodel is a little too desperate to remind listeners of Smells Like Teen Spirit), more often it’s infectious.

Thanks to co-producer Max Martin, who contributed to some of these tracks and knows his way around a hook, their version of rock is an aural food processor of stadium chants, processed-sounding beats, and wind-tunnel blare. Sometimes, an undeniable ear-worm emerges. ... It’s hard to tell how seriously Måneskin take any of this silliness. Certainly, being over the top suits them best.

When Måneskin tap into the youthful exuberance and fiery eccentricity that got them here in the first place, though, they’re still utterly unstoppable.

Rush! perfectly captures the sense of spontaneous authenticity that makes for a one-of-a-kind show. Måneskin continuously prove that outcasts deserve a good time, and they are here to give it to us.