ITALY 2021

The Italian final (Festival della canzone Italiana di Sanremo) concluded on March 6th at the Teatro Ariston of Sanremo, hosted by Amadeus & Fiorello. The festival lasts 5 evenings with different rounds and demographics of voting happening each night. On the Saturday evening, the public was able to vote for their favourites and after the the different voting results had been put together, the top 3 songs were placed in a 'superfinal'. Here, the overall winner would be decided from a combination of demoscopic jury (33%) press jury (33%) and televoting (34%). The winning act had first refusal to go to Eurovision, and during the winners' press-conference they confirmed they would be accepting the invitation. The winning act was Måneskin with the song "Zitti e buoni" (Shut up and behave)

During the four nights that they performed this song they wore a number of different outfits in a range of different colours, usually with all members of the band in the same outfit. The set up of the stage was generally the same with the lead singer front and centre, a guitarists on each side and the drummer at the back. The guitarists and singer move about quite a bit and interact with each other around the stage. The lighting and backdrop of Sanremo is rather basic and for the most part the stage was dark with plenty of red flashes against a dark background.

The song starts with one of the signature guitar riffs and and a pretty beefy drum beat then lead singer Damiano comes in with his monotonous verse. Not sure if this could be classed as rap, especially with such a raspy tone to his voice. The verse part is rather prolonged, almost like 2 verse in one and the backing track builds throughout the song. The chorus runs straight in from the verse and here the note are held for a tad longer making the rhythm stand out from what has gone on before. Then there is a instrumental break before the next verse which is pretty non-stop - the tempo and cadence of the  Italian language really lends itself  to this part. After another chorus there is another different instrumental where the strings of the orchestra really stands out. Then there is a extended bridge which mirrors this backing track and slows the pace down before a final chorus.

All the members of the band went to the same high school in Rome when they decided to set up a band. One of the founding members, guitarist Victoria, is half Danish hence the Nordic-inspired band name (forever pronounced wrongly throughout!)  which means Moonshine. Their big breakthrough came in 2017 when they participated in the 11 series of X Factor eventually coming second. Their chart record is rather impressive with five top 10 singles and their debut album going 3x Platinum. Their second album will be released in the coming days.

The song has some great earworms. The guitar riffs are really infectious and work well on their own and with singing on top of it. They must be given some credit for a half decent stage show under rather restrictive circumstances and staging but also that the live result is actually not that dissimilar to that of the the studio version. I can imagine given a bit more scope in the staging this could be visually stunning The whole thing is really catchy and if proably the best rock song out of the songs we already have on the setlist and i can imagine this doing really well. Obviously the Sanremo songs have additional live orchestral backing and the studio version is obviously more guitar based. It will be interesting to see in the reworking of the song (which will have to happen as it is just a few seconds too long) if they add some strings to give the song more ooomph. This did well in the Italian televote as their fans we well versed on voting for them during their stint on X Factor. Europe-wide, however, I don't see this as a winning song but could potentially cipher votes from acts that might purely on its originality

ARTIST - Måneskin
SONG - Zitti e buoni (Shut up and behave)
WRITING CREDITS - Damiano David, Victoria De Angelis, Thomas Raggi, Ethan Torchi