It's not often that you hear songs with catchy melodies, meticulous production and extravagant instrumental solutions, all together, one after the other, in the same album. When this happens, the first thing that automatically comes to mind is: “If this record had been released thirty or forty years ago, it could have become a classic”. This is what I thought even while listening to the debut album by Messiness, a Milanese band already active since 2024, created by Massimiliano Raffa, a multifaceted musician and professor of Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca.
Having set aside the Johann Sebastian Punk project, Raffa explodes his creativity (albeit controlled, as we will see) together with Filippo La Marca (keyboards), Rosario Lo Monaco (guitar), Giovanni Calella (bass) and Luca Anello (drums). The result is a crackling kaleidoscope of influences that highlight a remarkable musical culture, put at the service of a project that always maintains an enviable balance between different decades, exploring psychedelia between the Beatles and the Byrds, Britpop, progressive, hip-hop and even Canterbury (all benefiting from Raffa's singing in English which does not show the too often annoying Italian accent).
In particular, “Messiness” represents the revenge of the song format, of those who still firmly believe in the song, who do not consider it an antique and who are still able to write it with melodies that remain in mind at the first listen and, at the same time, take care of every detail obsessively (almost all the songs do not exceed three minutes). A large multifaceted cauldron that could be synthesized into psych pop.
Emblematic could be “Fatally”, with a sad and damned nostalgic Britpop melody – probably the result of the Strokes' sound – which would have everything to become a hit in another geological era, or at least in a less fragmented recording context. The riff funky rock with hip-hop singing of “Feature With A Rapper” opens with lightness and fun, but the quotes gradually become more elaborate: from the odd times inspired by the Caravan of “Eternity Unbound” (I think with an intrusion, like a collage, of the melody of “Light My Fire”), with a final escape canterburianato the loops psychedelics of “Optimised” and the lysergic guitar solo to conclude, which sounds, together with “Doctoral Get-Together”, as if taken from Tame Impala's best records. It is probably a theremin that opens “Anaesthetised”, another well-crafted piece, as well as “Cómo Baja, Cómo Sube”, a cornucopia of quotes.
The final five minutes of “By The Sea” sound like pop for ghosts, a distant memory of a music that no longer exists but which nevertheless hovers everywhere, like a 50s melody played at the “Bang Bang Bar” of “Twin Peaks” between nights spent drinking to forget, wrapped in the smoke of too many cigarettes.
05/29/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
