Plumbiferous Media

Nor­we­gian shoegaze band Serena-Maneesh is cer­tainly not the fastest group when it comes to record pro­duc­tion. Their first release arrived in 2002, but it took until 2005 to release an LP, with one other EP punc­tu­at­ing those three years. Of course, that only serves to make their sec­ond LP, which was released on the 22nd, all the more impor­tant a release for the band. Unfor­tu­nately, while Ser­ena Maneesh had a num­ber of very strong tracks, espe­cially for as polar­iz­ing a genre as shoegaze, Ser­ena Maneesh 2: Abyss in B Minor is not as strong an album.

As with Serena-Maneesh’s debut album, vocal duties on S-M 2 are shared by front­man Emil Niko­laisen and his sis­ter Elvira. While this sib­ling duet pro­vides vari­a­tion to the album’s vocals and by con­nec­tion to the album as a whole, flaws in both singers’ per­for­mances con­tribute greatly to the album’s lim­ited suc­cess. While vocals have always been, at least to some degree, a weak­ness for Serena-Maneesh, on S-M 2 it’s got­ten worse. Both voices have become even more breathy, and Emil’s voice falls all too often into an aim­less drone.

Vocal medi­oc­rity cer­tainly isn’t improved by the music’s over­all lack of direc­tion - while shoegaze as a genre prides itself on the cre­ation of an under­cur­rent of sound, for that to really work the music needs to be going some­where, rather than float­ing amongst itself in an amor­phous cloud. This is a self-perpetuating prob­lem - the vocals aren’t helped by this issue, and their lack of pur­pose cer­tainly doesn’t help to fix it. Instead, due to the vocal weak­nesses as well as the lack of inter­est­ing lyrics (the lyrics on S-M 2 feel more like filler than any­thing else), the album is greatly weakened.

While noth­ing on Ser­ena Maneesh 2: Abyss in B Minor even nearly matches “Drain Cos­met­ics” (from Ser­ena Maneesh), there are still some pretty decent tracks on S-M 2. The best of the album are the more active, highly styl­ized tracks like the opener and “Blow Yr Brains in the Mourn­ing Rain,” which develop a strong, almost catchy back­bone, con­tin­u­ously built on top of that theme, and have fewer vocal inter­rup­tions than the rest of S-M 2. Addi­tion­ally, it must be said that Serena-Maneesh uses extremely heavy elec­tronic effects to enor­mous suc­cess, both on the vocals and instru­men­tals, to enough of an extent that overdis­tor­tion was even used as an accept­able sub­sti­tute for repeated strumming.

But at the same time, about half of the rather short album was really not all that great. Some tracks were fairly bor­ing and over­con­sumed by the gen­er­ally harm­ful use of vocals on the album. Oth­ers went on a sur­pris­ing tan­gent, away from the stan­dard sound of both the band and S-M 2. While this in itself is cer­tainly not a bad thing, it becomes instantly clear when you lis­ten to them that Serena-Maneesh nor­mally sticks pretty closely to its stan­dard for a rea­son. Espe­cially with an album as short as S-M 2, it’s essen­tial that each track help the album along, and that’s sim­ply not what hap­pened with S-M 2

At the end of S-M 2, it’s hard to feel like much was accom­plished. Not quite forty min­utes of musi­cal waf­fling after the album’s open­ing (and by far best) track, “Ayisha Abyss,” we’re left in much the same place as we were after Serena-Maneesh’s debut album - some­what dis­ap­pointed while at the same time inter­ested by the bits of cre­ativ­ity that poke through the major­ity of the album. Ser­ena Maneesh 2: Abyss in B Minor is never ter­ri­ble and never excel­lent. Mostly, it’s thor­oughly mediocre, in some ways as dis­ap­point­ing as an awful album, and much less sat­is­fy­ing than a gen­uinely good one.

This post is tagged 50-59, Serena-Maneesh