Artist: Sheena-Maneesh

Album: S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor

Reviewer: Tom Breihan

Pitchfork, 2010

Writing Disorders: Infectious Punctuation, Jargon Palsy








Stuffiest Phrase: “it’s easy to admire the roiling conviction that makes the album go, but it’s a lot harder to love the actual songs that that conviction yields”

Critic Scabs: “XTRMNTR-era,” “quasi-medieval”




Tom, you’re one of those older music lice, so I don’t have any delusions about altering the course of your rotten writing. In a way, that makes pickling your prose more enjoyable on my end because I have no desire to help you. I can just boot your nads and twist.

Usually it takes me at least two sentences to gauge how lame a review’s going to be, but I didn’t even need to roam that far to get the inkling with yours:

“When Sufjan Stevens turned up in the credits to the self-titled 2006 debut from Norwegian fuzz-rockers Serena-Maneesh, it seemed pretty random — his fresh-faced orch-pop being about a million vibe-levels removed from their nodded-out lurch”

Tom, am I supposed to read this sentence or sing it out loud? There are so many little horizontal lines in your opening that it looks like Morse code at distances greater than three inches. Four hyphens in that last clause alone. That’s ridiculous. Two of those ionic compounds didn’t even NEED hyphens. Fuzz rockers. Vibe levels. You have a disorder.

I’m not going to let this slide. Did you have alien sex with Jess Harvell lately? The gene responsible for choosing another phrase over silly hyphenation seems to be completely burned out of your DNA:

“quasi-medieval flute-tootles”

“doom-metal riffage”

“the icy-beauty thing”

Tom, none of those phrases requires hyphenation with the exception of “quasi-medieval.” That one’s right. Congratulations. You have a disorder.

I’m going to move away from hyphens for a minute so I can lick some of your salt, Tom, because the salt tastes suspiciously like crap.

“the absurdly titled S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor”

How is that an absurd title? Do you have a rubric for determining whether or not an album name is worthy of favor? If so, I’m not getting it. Not three weeks ago you reviewed an album named “Snakes for the Divine” and there was no snide remark about that. Would it have helped if Serena-Maneesh enlisted Melvyn Grant to paint an actual abyss, or are you just more forgiving to metal releases because their fans are more likely to threaten to MMA your ass? Don’t feel too bad if that’s the case, Tom. I know the worst I’ll get from a miffed critic is a lengthy comment about how I’m a hypocrite for any number of reasons. I can take the blow.

I need to go to work soon, so let’s step away from the little things and move right into the spotty rash of a crux under your argument here. It has to do with the word “Loveless.”

“This time around, Serena-Maneesh face down the Loveless challenge more directly and bravely than any of their neo-shoegaze peers”

What challenge?

“But the problem with any album that invites this many comparisons to Loveless is simply that it’s not Loveless”

Really, Tom? I figured the real problem might be music critics comparing every band that decides to use a digiverb pedal to My Bloody Valentine. It doesn’t seem like every new hardcore album gets compared to Damaged or every thrash release to Master of Puppets, but whenever a band decides to use the trem bar when strumming distorted chords, it’s likely to be hammered for not living up to MBV’s second (and last) studio album. Who knows? Maybe these Serena people express their feelings best in a way that happens to sound like something else. I don’t think it qualifies as a made-up challenge to top another band’s release just because a writer can’t help but fall back on it to describe a band’s sound. That’s quasi-lazy, Tom.