For five years, Ben Seretan—a musician who lives in the Climax hamlet of Coxsackie, New York—has been calling Allora his “insane Italy record.” The word “allora” translates to “at that time” in Italian; Seretan and his band (Nico Hedley, Dan Knishkowy, Matt Bordin) made the thing on tape in Montebelluna across three July days in 2019. This idea that Seretan perhaps lingered across the cobblestone of bel paese, busking in Lugano and taking baths in apricots and sleeping on mattresses of focaccia the summer before summer couldn’t quite exist for millions of us—it all sounds so wonderful and one-of-a-kind and so long ago. Allora sounds like only two of those things, as Seretan shepherds his listeners through seven songs that, while they are already, technically, dated, arrive fresh and bewitching. It’s a guitar record that refuses to be categorized as such. Instead, Allora is one with the flora and fauna of drones, mangled horns and stone-cold rock ‘n’ roll. It answers to detail-driven emotion and blankets itself in communal tenderness.
Allora begins in a place of rapture, as the eight-minute “New Air” blisters through the frequencies like a Sonic Youth breakdown, before giving way to flutters of chord surfing. A three-minute introduction of noise, fragmented soloing and anticipation becomes a sensory overload, until Seretan plugs an onslaught of imagery into a heat-seeking missile of rock ‘n’ roll. “Cough drops and bumblebees in syrup / Bare feet resting on the window / When we drove to San Diego / We swam in every flooded valley,” he sings. It’s poetry wedged between hard-nosed, chameleonic guitar postures. Seretan is the kind of musician who isn’t afraid to keep you on your toes. The music he makes flutters between color—shape-shifting between indie rock, experimental and gauzy, metallic, spell-binding chatter. “New Air” hits a climax over and over, just as Wilco did on a song like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” 20 years ago. And then, all of a sudden, the loudness falls away and reveals Seretan alone, reckoning with what fills his lungs: “Oh, we breathe new air for the first time / Build a stone wall in my rib cage / So long, glad I got to know ya / Burn your postcards in the kitchen sink.”
“Climb the Ladder,” a song I’ve had on repeat since I first heard it, flashes a touch of Radiohead scribblings before retreating back to the safety of Ben Seretan’s four-or-five-genres-at-once sound. It sounds like two or three songs stitched together perfectly, and Seretan hangs on to his muse here, too, singing about “two feet to your open arms” and “10 foot to the bottom of the pond.” “Climb the Ladder” is a track about finding the courage to tell someone—a stranger, a lover, a friend, anyone—how you really feel about them and how you really feel about everything else. Seretan warbles in gibberish for half-a-minute before erupting into a punk-rock coda and unfurling into a repetition of “climb the ladder in the water” until it becomes blurred in all of his nasally, chaotic beauty.
“Bend” likewise never rests for a moment, even when it opens with tender guitar strums and Seretan humming about “flowers on the road, bending toward the sun.” “I could hear you singing for the last time,” he admits. “I could hear you grinning, spinning out the line.” Bend” arrives like a textbook guitar cut packed by chords that flirt with the kind of cowboy bravado you might not expect from an East Coaster. And yet, all of it works and all of it soars. Seretan’s lyricism is minimal, whispered like he’s reciting a notebook that also happens to have a colossal, crooning quake of rock ‘n’ roll thundering between its pages. “Bending with the weight of it, what I want could fill the world up,” Seretan sings out, before tracing his own mantra: “I will bend, not break.”
Ben Seretan’s catalog is dense and unpredictable. He has a drone record called My Life’s Work that is 24 hours long; there’s Cicada Waves, a collection of seven improvisational piano songs set to a backdrop of Appalachian soundscapes; his self-titled debut from 10 years ago is about as by-the-book as he’s ever been, and even then, the music is allergic to any particular box of rock ‘n’ roll. So, it should come as no surprise that Allora resists any obligations or expectations, though it remains tethered, intermittently, to tropes Seretan has fixated on.
The two-minute “Small Times” begins with the same kind of droning that My Life’s Work turned into a day-long exercise, until Seretan’s falsetto creeps and the guitar bellyaches like a ripple atop synthesizers draped in hypnotic, swirling confusion. “I want you around,” Seretan sings. “Hold me in the small times, laughing yellow wind chimes.” You feel it everywhere. “Jubilation Blues” is a tempest of a romance slipping through sore fingers and buckled by sharp vignettes of adoration. “I saw the pond water steaming off you on the dance floor, I saw you crushing can after can of Miller High Life,” Seretan documents. “I wanted to tell you something you ain’t ever heard before, I wanted to press my face to your kitchen floor.” When the five minutes of low-intensity, gaudy, mourning guitar subsides, we are left with Seretan alone. “I was watching you when you were watching me watching you,” he sings, and the keyboards kiss a brief but euphoric finale into the air around him.
Allora is a special body of work for how Ben Seretan presents grief through intervals of intensity and delicacy. The penultimate song “Free” is eight minutes long and holds less than 30 words, but that brevity becomes a token of sentimentality taking shape as a silent smile. “We were laughing without making any sound,” he sings. “I sat on the uneven ground.” A chaotic segue of piercing, squeaking horns sound like nails on a chalkboard behind him, as he yelps “Were it that I was free? Ah, free.” And then, without flinching, the arrangement returns to normal—cascading into a face-melting guitar solo finale that ruptures like a bruise flanking softness.
Both parts of Seretan’s language walk away with flowers, their duality presented in equal measure, as if my bloody valentine is trying to soundtrack a Wendell Berry book. But, sometimes, it sounds like someone ran the Drive-By Truckers through a meat grinder and then collaged them back together with sprouts of lavender and lace. And, sometimes, it sounds like neither of those things. The album is this convergence of worlds that is as immediate and kind and gentle as it is scabbed over, protracted and age-old, both marauding and marauded. The hypnagogic drones on “Every Morning is A” perform an elegy beneath Seretan’s drawling murmur, until a silk-spun guitar tone emerges, retreats and re-emerges. It’s like a seance and a goodbye all at once; a hand both waving you away and beckoning you to come closer, depending on what angle you’re looking at it from. In that context, Ben Seretan’s last words on Allora hold necessary multitudes: “Glory, hallelujah.” Let’s rejoice.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
