Serena Maneesh - No.2 Abyss in B Minor

 

For those of you not already familiar with this Norwegian outfit, try and imagine, if you will, a band capable of a support slot on tours with Oasis, The Dandy Warhols and Nine Inch Nails. Pretty impossible huh? Well that's exactly what these fellas have on their CV. Accordingly there is apparently also some confusion within the music itself. The opening track to their long-incubating second LP is a cold, instrumental slice of post-apocalyptica that would certainly justify the NIN slot were it at all representative of the rest of the album. In fact, what follows that atmospheric opener are seven slices of spaced-out alternative pop, like My Bloody Valentine on magic mushrooms. There's an underlying fuzzy momentum to this material that makes the Dandy Warhol support logical, yet much of the album is spent waiting for that earlier cold instrumentalism to rear its head again. As to how the hell the Oasis thing came about, that's anybody's guess. [Chris Cusack]