There just isn’t anything worse in music than a song or an album that doesn’t matter on any level beyond superficiality. Sadly, Italian trio Hot Gossip have discovered this fact with their sophomore effort, You Look Faster When You Are Young.Young continues the pattern of UK bands churning out choppy, staccato riffs over dancing bass lines and snarky frontmen. The problem with this particular example is that while HG’s brethren (ahem, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand) write actual songs with those parts included, HG itself writes riffs, not melodies. Every single track in this collection is written around a sassy riff as if the riff itself will write the rest of the song automatically. As a result, cuts like ‘Fast In The Rain’ or ‘And Again’ start off great but then have nowhere to go without anything memorable beyond the first twenty seconds. Thus, the songs are enjoyable while they’re playing but none of them stay with you after they’re over. The one exception to this is ‘You Better Know.’ While it does have a hook beyond the opening, the song goes on for an entire minute too long due to the fact that the chorus is repeated ad nauseam. The chorus hook is driven right into the ground. In the course of four minutes, it goes from “this is catchy” to “this is brilliant” to “I’ve overdosed on skittles.” Chop off the last quarter and you’ve got yourself a great track.Aside from the lack of any hooks or melodies, the music is still pleasurable, albeit rather pale. The instrumental workout ‘You Name It’ has a fantastically coy cat-and-mouse game between the rhythm section and the guitar, ‘Cops With Telephones’ grooves well enough and comes close to a guitar-and-vocal hook in the chorus, and ‘Everybody Else’ is built around a footrace between guitar and bass that nearly grabs your attention. But even with all that going for it, Young still lacks significance past its 34-minute run time. While it plays, the record is entertaining ”“ to a degree. But after it’s over, the only reason to return to it the next day or week is to attempt to recall what was heard in the first place.Hot Gossip clearly tried really, really hard to make a brilliant record of catchy, guitar-driven pop. It got almost half way, which is quite the shame considering the budding talent here. In order to fully enjoy You Look Faster When You Are You, it must be acknowledged that dumb fun is still fun. 68%Hot Gossip on Myspace