When Sufjan Stevens turned up in the credits to the self-titled 2006 debut from Norwegian fuzz-rockers Serena-Maneesh, it seemed pretty random-- his fresh-faced orch-pop being about a million vibe-levels removed from their nodded-out lurch. But now, four years later, S-M have finally gotten around to dropping a follow up, and hey, Sufjan's back again, adding barely perceptible instrumental flourishes (vibraphone, flute, piano) to the general maelstrom. Here Sufjan's presence makes a little bit more sense. Like his Scandinavian co-conspirators, Sufjan likes his jams elaborate. And though the absurdly titled S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor might not bring the layered twee overkill of, say, Illinois, it's still busy as all hell.
This time around, Serena-Maneesh face down the Loveless challenge more directly and bravely than any of their neo-shoegaze peers. While most effects-pedal new jacks are content to let their guitar whoosh enhance their diffuse hooks, Serena-Maneesh use noise and pop against each other, staging an internal war in every single track. The band does write hooks, but those hooks have to claw their way through layers of wriggling noise to reach sunlight. To get to track two, album-highlight and single "I Just Want to See Your Face", you have to make it through "Ayisha Abyss", a seven-minute instrumental motorik dirge caked in crackly, inscrutable shards of walkie-talkie chatter. And you'd think "Face", a three-minute love song, would prove a lot friendlier, but no, not really. Even there, everything seems to be fighting everything else, as staticy half-formed guitar riffs push against each other, and the melody, while pretty, never quite resolves. Serena-Maneesh make your ears work.
More often than not, they reward that work. There's nearly as much XTRMNTR-era Primal Scream here as there is MBV. It's fun just to hear the way they orchestrate all the chaos on a song like "Honeyjinx", where, at any given moment, you'll hear quasi-medieval flute-tootles, windchimes, narcotized vocals, and gigantically misanthropic doom-metal riffage. On the album-closing "Magdalena (Symphony #8)", acoustic guitars and rippling bongos sweeten the mood but can't pierce the thick, viscous coat of synthetic drone that slathers everything.
But the problem with any album that invites this many comparisons to Loveless is simply that it's not Loveless. As on that album, the songs feel like they're whirling so far into the stratosphere that they might fly apart any second. But the basic melodies on Loveless were strong enough to carry the burden of the effects, and the same can't always be said about Serena-Maneesh. Like Primal Scream, they rely a little too much on seething cool when any sort of deeper feeling would go a long way. Elvira Nikolaisen's vocals may have a certain mysterious, icy beauty, but it's not the kind that hints at big things going on beneath the surface. Meanwhile, when her frontman brother Emil sings, he doesn't even have the icy-beauty thing to fall back on. So it's easy to admire the roiling conviction that makes the album go, but it's a lot harder to love the actual songs that that conviction yields.
