“I just got through listening to Serena Maneesh’s S-M 2: Abyss in B-Minor and boy, are my ears tired.” – Buddy Hackett

Full disclosure right off the bat: I’m not the biggest fan of Nu Gaze (if there even is such a thing). Don’t get me wrong, I like Sigur Ros as much as the next guy, but this style of music is not well represented on my portable music device. Also, I’m still annoyed at how confusing it is to figure out the title of this album.

In other words, Serena Maneesh was kind of ice-skating uphill from the get go, even though that’s not really fair. I gave it a First Listen and was initially intrigued, but ended up forgetting about it for a while. But then I learned that the band recorded parts of this album in a cave. A straight-up, cavernous cave. Who does that? Naturally, I was on board again.

As I got back in to the album, I realized that despite the tidy run time of just 37 minutes, S-M 2: AIBM felt a lot longer. It’s big, intimidating, dark, and the more I paid attention to it, the longer the album got. Maybe there’s something to that title after all. But every listen took a lot of effort to make it through. Partly because of my initial stance, I’m sure. But moreso because it is just challenging, almost standoffish. And that is both a good thing and a bad thing.

The good thing is that S-M 2: AIBM demands to be listened to as an album. Something I wish there was more of. It’s an ambitious, full experience. The bad thing is that it wears you down after a while. That said, because of all the textural noise, you can throw on the album in the background and just zone out, not really paying attention to anything. Which I started to do around the 5th or 6th listen. It works both ways.

Since it never really got any easier to work through, I tried jumping around to tracks out of order and it didn’t work at all. There’s nary a single on this record. I suppose the airy, Volkswagen-esque “D.I.W.S.W.T.T.D.” or the surprising “I Just Want To See Your Face” are good stand-alone songs. Actually in fairness, they are. “Face” came out of nowhere and danced brightly in my head after the dark, seven-minute “Ayisha Abyss” opened the album and tricked me into thinking I was in for a long haul of fuzz and radio crackle. While “D.I.W.S.W.T.T.D.” is probably the closest this record came to getting something stuck in my head. But everything worked better in context. And I believe that’s just the way the band wants it.

To illustrate, imagine if “D.I.W.S.W.T.T.D.” really was in a car commercial (which it totally could be, minus the line about a “naked bone”):

- “Do you know that song in the new Volkswagen ad?”
- “Yeah man, I found it online and downloaded it.”
- “Cool, I want to get it too. What’s it called?”
- “Diewswatthededdtd.”

I have written out that song three times in this review so far and I still can’t remember the title, let alone pronounce it. It’s almost as if they are actively trying to make it a pain to recall individual songs. I wish, in the spirit of the classical music-influenced title, that Serena Maneesh just did away with the individual songs and released the album as a single track. It’s all meant to be one piece, anyway.

Presentation issues aside, the music production is very impressive. On “Blow Yr Brains In The Morning Rain” the guitars sound as if they are being slid over gravel as they morph into nasty hooks with a strangely familiar sound. On “Melody for Jaana” there are percussion hits in the background that have a haunting echo to them that makes the song feel open and damp and oh yeah, that’s right… these crazy Norweigans recorded this in a cave! I can’t get over that.

Listening to this album makes me want to find some parchment and write down formulas for potions. I can’t imagine what this would be like at a live show. If I wanted to check out a bunch of hot, super-cool Viking Girls, I might go and find out. In the meantime, I will just have this on in the background.

The words in the title of this post are a mouthful. More specifically, a mouthful of eighteen syllables that seem better suited to a review for the soundtrack of a Bollywood horror musical. Thank god there is a hyphen in there, otherwise this post would have read like this: “First Listen: Serena Maheesh’s Serena Maneesh 2: Abyss in B Minor.”

If it’s not obvious by now, I didn’t know anything about this band before I gave S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor a First Listen. Sure, I could have Wiki-ed the shit out of them and pretended to myself like I knew what was up, but I figured I would save that for later. Why not just dive right in? All I had to go on was the press release that accompanied the promotional download, which told me that they were 1) Norwegian and 2) a good band. Like… a really good band. Okay, the press release fucking loved them. I guess I missed the boat (the Knarr?) when their self-titled debut came out in 2005. I haven’t listened to it yet. But I might.

First, though, I’m going to give S-M 2: AIBM a Second Spin. I didn’t love it, but god damn is it one strange album. Just all over the place with songs that stopped, stuttered, started and merged in to one another. They did that thing where the next song started at the end of the song you were listening to. It seems kind of gimmicky (and really, it is) but they pulled it off. In large part because everything is so batshit weird.  The album is a foggy cloud of textural noise with clear bubbles of melody, lyrics, and grooves that occasionally float by as you stumble around, kind of lost. It’s a lot like Can. And I really like Can. The real question is whether or not those moments will be enough to sustain multiple listens, especially when you know they are coming.  The album comes out on March 23rd.