Cocoa puffs, meh. The better story is rock's 50-year failure to make plain its furious soundmaker, the electric guitar. Sound is vibration, pure tone is farce, distortion is social, inevitable. No surprise, my faves who've struggled with that pop vs. noise, structure vs. unstructure windigo-- Branca, Hendrix, Velvets, Can, Sonic Youth, JAMC, MBV, Fennesz-- count for some of modern music's all-time greatest failures. Here's another one.
Norway's Serena Maneesh take the main stage at Oslo's Øya Music Festival dressed like gypsies. Band leader Emil Nikolaisen has a wispy moustache, Chick Corea-style, Jimi-worshipping. His half-sister on bass could ring for Nico, a cold, daunting figure from afar, no stage movements, noble and grand, somewhat melancholic. The other members I can't see. "What a fucking mission this band's on," I think. "What a terrible fucking band."
They tinker on stage with a hint of motorik for 20 minutes, then a stomp of it, no sign of stopping; people have no stomach for this diskaholic bullshit, and tuck out for chicken and beer and, I think, Roots Manuva. No cue, no looks, Nico snaps a bassline from the stew of guitar noise and disembodied voices, and suddenly Serena Maneesh are bars into the festival's first and only mindfuck-- the one I went several thousand miles hoping I might experience. Tucked deep within "Sapphire Eyes High" is the only melody that matters this fall, its chorus unintelligible because Nico's voice dissipates upon exit-- so too do the stringy jangle and generously amped kick. The breathy line goes for but 30 seconds, entirely too short, then dissolves back into the abstractions that birthed it. So much noise it takes to balance out so beautiful a moment.
They get it, Serena Maneesh, their demeanor electric and alternating, built off antagonistic relationships. The band, like the instrument, are apt to prove noise and un-noise are of one cut. To that end, these aren't 11 songs so much as 12 blood-riling arguments. "Un-Deux" jumps forth and back from sunshine pop to pork-pulled guitar noise, a clean but 30-mile-wide gap between the two, more impassible with each repetition. Two minutes, they give up. "Don't Come Down Here" takes a ho-hum strum and hopes that the one fissure in the progression-- a sloppy passing chord that butts with what's before and after it-- will, with enough repetitions, spiderweb and eat away the pleasantness. Nope. "Chorale Lick" and "Candlelighted" meander half their lengths, soft-focus guitars and brute syncopated grooves with nonsense floating in and about, shrouding melodies too shimmering for bare sight.
The album as a whole fights the twelfth, track sequence playing up each song's coaster-like turmoil. A subtle move, but it bleaches the whites, deepens the blacks-- rare chiaroscuro for rock's faint of art. Listen, those fuzzy guitar octaves that start the record could have led us anywhere-- so for-fun, so worry-free-- but instead we follow them into themselves, until this full-length debut implodes with 10 minutes of dizzying, even skronky frustration, then a shriek off the footbridge. Why are the stakes so high? Better question is, why not?
