MESSINESS - Messiness

It doesn't happen often to hear songs with catchy melodies, meticulous production and eccentric instrumental choices, all together, one after another, on the same album. When it does happen, the first thing that automatically comes to mind is: "If this record had come out thirty or forty years ago, it could have become a classic". That's exactly what I thought listening to the debut album by Messiness, a Milanese band already active since 2024, the brainchild of Massimiliano Raffa, a versatile musician and professor of Sociology at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

Having set aside the Johann Sebastian Punk project, Raffa lets his creativity explode (albeit in a controlled way, as we'll see) alongside Filippo La Marca (keyboards), Rosario Lo Monaco (guitar), Giovanni Calella (bass) and Luca Anello (drums). What comes out of it is a sparkling kaleidoscope of influences revealing a remarkable musical culture, put to the service of a project that always maintains an enviable balance between different decades, exploring psychedelia somewhere between the Beatles and the Byrds, britpop, progressive, hip-hop and even Canterbury scene sounds (all of it helped along by Raffa's English vocals, which never betray that too-often grating Italian accent).

In particular, "Messiness" represents the vindication of the song format (almost all the tracks clock in under three minutes) — the kind made by people who still firmly believe in the song, who don't treat it as some antique relic, and who are still able to write one with melodies that stick in your head from the first listen while obsessing over every last detail. A vast, shape-shifting melting pot that could be summed up as psych-pop.

"Fatally" might be the emblematic track here, with a sad, damnably nostalgic britpop melody — probably indebted to the Strokes sound — that would have everything it takes to become a hit in another geological era, or at least in a less fragmented record industry. The funk-rock riff with hip-hop vocals on "Feature With A Rapper" opens things up with lightness and fun, but the references grow increasingly elaborate as the album goes on: from the odd-time signatures inspired by Caravan on "Eternity Unbound" (with what I believe is a collage-like intrusion of the melody from "Light My Fire"), complete with a Canterbury-style closing fugue, to the psychedelic loops of "Optimised" and its concluding lysergic guitar solo, which, together with "Doctoral Get-Together", sounds as if it had been torn straight out of Tame Impala's finest records. It's probably a theremin that opens "Anaesthetised", another meticulously crafted track, just like "Cómo Baja, Cómo Sube", a cornucopia of references.

The final five minutes of "By The Sea" sound like pop for ghosts, a distant memory of a music that no longer exists but still lingers everywhere, like a '50s melody playing at the "Bang Bang Bar" from "Twin Peaks", amid nights spent drinking to forget, wrapped in the smoke of one too many cigarettes.

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29/05/2026