The Bologna-based supergroup coalesced, apparently, somewhere between a Peter Jackson Beatles documentary and a Blur reunion at Wembley, which tells you almost everything you need to know about their musical co-ordinates and absolutely nothing about why they work so magnificently. Because the familiar lineage — Big Star to Blur, Kinks to Libertines, Syd Barrett with a side of Beck — could easily produce something arch and airless, a clever band making music for music critics. *How To Manage A Crisis* is emphatically not that record.
"Hide & Seek" opens proceedings and announces the agenda immediately: "Thousands of people are joining together to play from all over the world," they sing, and the image is so perfectly Gee Whiz! it might as well be a manifesto. Fundamentally unifying, expansive, it pulls you straight into the middle of the party and dares you to stay at the edges. It is the sound of a band that has already decided you are their friend, whether you like it or not.
"Mr. Dinosaur" follows and is the album's emotional core: an open letter to the sensitive and displaced, the overly-feeling souls who find the modern world simply too much. "Mr Dinosaur, I know how you feel," they sing, and they mean it. The genius of the song — and of the album as a whole — is that it never condescends to its subject. It meets the dinosaur where he is, acknowledges the heart of gold behind the scary growl, and responds not with pity but with solidarity. The climactic "OH BABY WE LOVE YOU" is the kind of moment that divides listeners cleanly in two: those who find it excruciating, and those who understand that music was invented precisely for this.
"Big Fireworks" — the first song written for the record, apparently, and the one that confirmed this project was worth pursuing — arrives third and hits like a reminder of what rock'n'roll is actually for. Two breathless minutes of acidic guitars, driving bass and "space cake pillows and super fuzz," tipping its hat simultaneously to Beck and Blur without ever feeling like a tribute act. The euphoria is real and earned.
"Magic Carpets" bristles with Libertines-esque urgency and manages, with characteristic Gee Whiz! audacity, to make alien contact both funny and genuinely moving. Visitors from outer space land on Earth seeking peaceful connection and flee, appalled, from our present-day chaos — acid rain, clogged highways, crashing planes — while the chorus proposes riding magic carpets through skyscrapers as a utopian form of resistance. As political manifestos go, it's more convincing than most.
"The Wake" is perhaps the definitive statement, urging listeners to "LET'S SING AS LOUD AS YOU CAN" — grammatically anarchic, emotionally unimpeachable. The band know things are not fine. This record never pretends otherwise. The argument it makes, consistently and with remarkable grace, is that joy isn't denial. It's strategy.
"My Own" gives the album's midsection some necessary breathing room before "Emily," Kinks-flavoured and fleet-footed, narrates a girl's escape into the woods to face the world on her own terms — a psychedelic fairytale that Mariagiulia Degli Amori lifts into something stranger and more affecting than a simple pop song has any right to be. "Little Dan," hovering between Barrett and Panda Bear in its sinuous, softly lysergic way, celebrates the radical imagination of a solitary child who nonetheless commanded quiet respect from everyone around him.
"Cocktail Umbrellas" arrives late in the running order with the ease of a band who know they can afford to be playful at this point, before "Goodnight" closes things out with the unhurried confidence of a group that has said everything it came to say. It is, as a farewell, exactly right: warm, slightly wistful, leaving you wanting to start the whole thing over again.
What Michele "Mike" Giuliani, Degli Amori, Paul Pieretto and Giacomo Gelati have pulled off across these ten tracks — with producer Bruno Germano at Vacuum Studio and Carl Saff's mastering giving it a warm, slightly bruised sheen — is something rather more difficult than it sounds: they have made enthusiasm feel like a political act. The title, then, is not ironic so much as genuinely instructive. Faced with the grinding ambient dread of being alive right now, Gee Whiz! propose hook-driven melodies, pyrotechnic fuzz guitars, and the radical act of singing together at full volume. It's an answer. Not a complete one — but then, which answer ever is?
Debut albums this self-assured and this generously spirited don't come along often. How To Manage A Crisis is one to play loud, play repeatedly, and press urgently into the hands of anyone who's lately started to feel like a dinosaur themselves.