Italian post-rock differs from North American post-rock in one crucial aspect: It's played by Italians. Otherwise, the sensibility-- imposing, grandiose, broadly abstracted, and elusively creepy-- is identical. The Torino-based band Larsen's latest seems a cross between Godspeed's elliptical storytelling and Swans' doomy elegance (Jarboe imbues several tracks with haunting vocal auras), and like its title, it's an enigmatic palindrome-- leavened with ambiguous portent, it would play just as well in reverse, with all of its amorphous eloquence intact. There's a story here, but instead of unfolding, it revolves in diminishing orbits, wending deeper and deeper into the tiny gaps between Antony and the Johnsons collaborator Julia Kent's quivering cellos and Larsen's lapping electrical waves.
"The Snow" opens the album, a post-rock primer layering deep brown pulsations over mechanical sputter and buzz, swelling strings over percussive stabs of acoustic guitar. A muffled clatter moves across the channels like something tumbling down stairs, a sound that resolves into the crisp tattoo of a marble bouncing and rolling across a wooden floor as the spacious mix presses in claustrophobically. It's as if you're moving deeper into forbidding architecture, toward the dark heart of the thing, the boiler room or basement. Thunder rolls in the distance; the narrative thrust is indistinct but pointedly sinister. The brief "2nd" shushes up and down on a ladder of echoing percussion punctuated by hollow reports, rudimentary guitar, and spectral vocal harmonies, evoking some infernal machine of flesh, steel, and bone. That's how it sounded to me, anyway. On songs like these, the interpretive possibilities are limited only by the listener's penchant for the diabolical, and it's not hyperbole to refer to these moments as literally hellish.
Elsewhere on SeieS, Larsen leaves less to the imagination, sacrificing thematic depth for melodic breadth, and the resultant impression is heaven to the more nebulous tracks' hell. "Mother" flaps languidly like colossal wings, its high whistles and yawning, slowly sawing stings given shape by a gently tumbling bass line, wafting percussion, whispery vocal accents, and a slightly lagging guitar melody. "Rever" rises up on a pillar of wowing distortion, idyllic guitars and gleaming celestial tones tracing out a luminous melody across the tumult, with a hymn-like quality to its reverent ascent. All this weighty insinuation, this evoked latitude of experience-- damnation and redemption, hope and despair-- is familiar from a multitude of other post-rock albums, and listeners who've grown weary of the genre's contrivances will find nothing rejuvenating here. But those who still get a spiritual kick from soundtracking their sunset commutes with the appropriate bombast will find SeieS to be a valuable entry in the canon.
