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And now, how will I end this summer? What's the final blow? I want to feel a bit suburbia. I want it lying on the floor, I want to crack its spine with the worn sole of elegant leather shoes and then pull the trigger and imprint the black and white frame of matter splashes like a volcanic eruption. I prepare its end today, on Thursday, thinking about how to close the parties and not drag this agony of short sleeves too far, even if it's hot and on the weekend I keep swimming relentlessly.
The homecoming leaves me alone. Unfortunately, those who stay – cynically – aren't worth as much as those who leave. And so I want to make these four youngsters who are left alone happy, play the role of the great mother one more time and not see them again for another nine months. Out of infamy. I want to leave them a memory that commands respect. That respect that, when I pretend not to know them in the winter, won't make them think I'm a jerk, it will leave them puzzled, after all. But in the end, there must remain in them the hope of regrouping in the next summer round.
Who will be there in the next summer round? I'm lying on the couch smoking and trying to imagine a couple of jerks and Bilinda Butcher, a girl I'll miss forever and have always been missing, and Jonathan Donahue. There will be Eno, maybe my brother, with Jim Reid and Jake Burns of Stiff Little Finger, and with Mark Clair and Dennis McFarlane of 4hero. The herb is good.
At this point, I think that in the room empty of any kind of object, those two sly candles will illuminate a particular situation: artistic direction and discoordination a la Hugo Ball and Serena Maneesh abrading the brain cortexes in a destructive collective sweat dedicated to power plants, where everything melts in their belly.
The Serena Maneesh melt away in this second release. Their musical foundries open the doors of the furnace to more or less everyone I mentioned before, and they put together an album of impressive decadence. A decadence that gets acquainted with different musical trends while still magnifying a subject – ruler relationship, of total prostration, that our artists have towards the already mentioned Butcher & merry Valentina's bloody company. The fierceness and evanescence of these Norwegians' sound make me think of the moment when a coffin is opened and you see there, before your eyes, disappearing into the nothingness of a cosmic air, a body. Perhaps the worn-out carcass of punk and dark new wave, which are redeemed and finally, relaxed, gain access to a place the living can't know.
Or, simply, for those who have had a robust opium smoke in their life, here's the magnificent sensation of total disappearance of any paranoia and libidinous confusion, without censorship, and free from any inhibition.
The album opens with "Ayisha Abyss" which is a mess of unnatural proportions. Starting from here, throughout the work, there is a snaking devastating and radiant electricity: state-of-the-art. But it's right here that we understand what death the SM want to make us die. A sort of psychedelic trance (4hero), soaked in electronic whips in a totally dark atmosphere in a situation where the most ethereal thing is the sensation that with this album one could really get hurt. Great, great track. From here on, for less than forty minutes, the band feels its way through fertile ground for itself, demonstrating the ability to produce a masterful shoegaze, enriching it with moments of different nature: from the psychotic startle ballad to that with folk-noise echoes, from edgy tracks to open and metrically original ones. All the while governing a spiral of flowing distortions, and rhythms sometimes Smith-like, with a ruthless use of cacophony (it really seems like the notes fall off the sheet music, listening to them play).
Not the best, then, because there's a clear feeling that all of this has been heard before. But it's the form in which all this is represented that works. Contemporary and, in a sense, catchy.
Surely it will be good for absorbing for the last time the unconscious moods of the people I use.
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