In the summer of 2006, I uprooted my entire life to move to Los Angeles and the first two months consisted of fruitlessly looking for a job, moving apartments three times, getting acquainted with Jeff Weiss and, thusly, weed at least a dozen times as potent as any I’d ever experienced in my life.
So to the degree I can really remember anything about those days, forgive me for only retaining two facts about the time I saw Serena-Maneesh at the Troubadour. The first is that they extended the intro to my favorite song of theirs by about ten minutes. That would be “Don’t Come Down Here,” which earns that accolade by sounding like Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” living its best life as a blown-out shoegaze ballad. The second, and far more important, thing is that S-M mastermind Emil Nikolaisen wore a frilly shirt and a bandana and a pencil mustache. Dude looked like a pirate, or…I dunno, Richie Sambora.
I typically don’t remember what any band wore on stage 17 years ago unless it was utterly ridiculous or unfathomably awesome. Emil Nikolaisen was both. And that pirate outfit matters, only partially because it’s a reminder that this mysterious, ultra-cool Norwegian shoegaze band had “friends with Sufjan Stevens” clout throughout their existence and the costumery to prove it. Rather, it’s a reminder that the most important thing about Serena-Maneesh - and, in fact, the whole reason they’re the subject of this piece in 2023 - is that while almost no mid-aughts indie bands were crazy, sexy or cool, they were all three. Which is to say, swaggy.
Before we get to that, it’s probably more true that Serena-Maneesh was a thing in 2005 because it had been nearly a decade since there was a real-deal shoegaze band that indie critics could get behind. This became very evident when I was part of Pitchfork’s “The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time” voting bloc in 2016 and the vast majority of the inclusions were clustered into a five-year period between 1990 and 1995; I was initially assigned to write the Serena-Maneesh blurb but then it somehow got scrapped for reasons that I never learned and never cared to look into (if they had been canceled on the low for some reason, I usually get told about that).
But anyways, my blurb touched on how shoegaze had mostly been a dormant format for most of the early 2000s, that “shoegaze-y” would forever be a descriptor in indie rock, but its days of being a legitimate scene were gone and never to return. And that was certainly borne out by the final tally, where the sole inclusions from that time were artists who took shoegaze to barely recognizable extremes - you had M83 and Ulrich Schnauss applying the principles of shoegaze to synth-based music and Jesu setting the course for blackgaze or doomgaze, or whatever you want to call it. There was also an Autolux album from 2004 in there, which sort of felt like seeing Scott Rolen elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame - I mean, they were a perennial all-star for their era, and I knew real heads who were super into them, but are you gonna tell your kids about the time you saw them in person? (fwiw, as dull as it is to argue about any Hall of Fame, I think we can all agree that Remembering Some Guys should be outside their scope)
But as I wrote in my UPROXX “Best Blog Rock Albums” list, “a band didn’t need to be transformative or even all that original to rocket out of obscurity in the decentralized, yet powerful blogosphere. Hitting the right nostalgic notes for the right writer at the right time was more than enough.” I was talking about Tapes ‘n Tapes and Cymbals Eat Guitars and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, bands who were extremely bloggy in name and appearance, which is to say that they conveyed absolutely no danger or sex appeal whatsoever. Serena-Maneesh, though…some of them dressed like Scandinavian pirates (but not Vikings, which is more prog metal and thus uncool) and others were bassist Hilma Nikolaisen, who, on the cover of S-M Backwards, looks like Nico reimagined for an indie rock version of Def Jam: Vendetta.
Not that I’m in a position to judge anyone for how they blogged back in 2005, but the Serena-Maneesh aura inspired Nick Sylvester to begin his 8.6 review as such:
Cocoa puffs, meh. The better story is rock's 50-year failure to make plain its furious soundmaker, the electric guitar. Sound is vibration, pure tone is farce, distortion is social, inevitable. No surprise, my faves who've struggled with that pop vs. noise, structure vs. unstructure windigo-- Branca, Hendrix, Velvets, Can, Sonic Youth, JAMC, MBV, Fennesz-- count for some of modern music's all-time greatest failures. Here's another one.
Somehow it only gets more “Pitchfork 2005” from there. He says that “Sapphire Eyes High” has “the only melody that matters this fall,” but I dunno man, that Matt Pond PA album with “So Much Trouble” dropped like a month later.
Still, Serena-Maneesh owed their ability to play sold-out, 500-cap rooms in 2006 to a Best New Music from the prior year and their self-titled was every bit as centrist and referential as The Loon or Why There Are Mountains, albeit drawing from different, more sensually alluring sources. Most blog rock was meant for mix CDs or meet-cutes, this was something you could legitimately describe as “make-out music.”
It’s abrasive, but not brittle in that A Place to Bury Strangers sort of way. It’s ethereal (yes, yes, I know, it’s still a useful adjective) but not ambient. The production has muscle and clarity, but it’s not slick. They love that chord change from the verse of “Soon,” but this really doesn’t sound all that much like Loveless - it just sounds more like Loveless than the other major shoegaze albums that existed before then.
This isn’t the deepest dive to Remember Some Guys - Serena-Maneesh absolutely holds up, it’s an album I spin at least once a year, particularly during the winter. But in the interest of truly committing to this bit, I ran through a Serena-Maneesh odds and ends collection that’s damn near an hour and a half in preparation for this piece. And while the songs themselves aren’t particularly revelatory (they really believed in “Beehiver,” that’s more or less it), this embryonic version of S-M makes me hear their best work in an entirely different way. There a bunch of songs that you could call a “motorik,” a bunch that reference Suicide, some attempts at Jesus and Mary Chain style noise-pop, stuff that really isn’t all that far off from what Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were doing at the time. All of which is to say that Serena-Maneesh were an Austin Psych Fest/Levitation/Desert Daze-midline band in shoegaze drag. The latter made them swaggy and critically acclaimed, but the former could’ve made them way more popular.
The whole Levitation-type scene fascinates me because while most of the bigger bands draw from some of the most universally acknowledged cool music to ever exist - Velvet Underground, JAMC, Spacemen 3, things of that nature - these bands aren’t considered cool by critics at all. Maybe they’ll get some burn early on, but once they get lumped into that world, it’s a wrap - let’s not forget the one or two years where Ty Segall was truly poppin’ and The Men laundered these same influences through a veneer of “ugly NYC indie rock is back!” (those records ruled too). When was the last time you heard someone talk about Black Angels or Black Mountain or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or Brian Jonestown Massacre? They do big numbers!
But I get it. At the risk of being overly reductive and snarky (but fuck it, this is my Substack), I’ve always found something deflating and sometimes even cynical about the aggressively backwards-looking nature of this music; for all of the things that’s easy to detest about Anton Newcombe in Dig!, I find it telling that his one-step solution for everything wrong with the current state of rock music is always to take things back to 1975 or 1968 or whatever else is considered the year where rock ‘n roll was perfected.
Maybe I’m biased because I live in Southern California, where Desert Daze-type music (i.e., psych-rock, but also goth or garage or post-punk adjacent) will be perpetually popular, and I’m also biased because a lot of the people with whom I talk about music IRL have been to Levitation or Desert Daze or really want to go. They tend to be fairly unimpressed with most new indie rock that has emerged in the past 20 years unless it sounds something like Nick Cave. They tend to like Idles and black midi, think Tame Impala is for sorority girls and even these people tend to think Iceage is just OK, which is really more damning than anything I’ve ever said about them.
Side note, a few years ago, one of the money people from a relaunching publication asked if they could pick my brain and it felt like they had decided to cast their lot with the King Gizzard and Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees crowd. I thought this was a very savvy move, seeing as that the content is constant, the audience is extremely loyal and there’s a real void for publications that treat this scene as their true north. Moreover, it aligned with the general sense that they wanted to honor their psych-rock roots but they, uh, ended up going in a quite different direction.
All of which to say is that Serena-Maneesh probably could’ve carved out a comfortable, Dungen-like career for themselves if they simply kept going. After 2006, they pretty much disappeared for four years and dropped a second album in 2010 with an absolutely ridiculous (but nonetheless swaggy) title of SM 2: Abyss in B Minor - I don’t recall much about its reception, but Tom Breihan gave it a 6.4 in a review that strongly suggested that he might think Loveless is overrated (this is why I continue to read him at Stereogum and miss the days of the General Music critic, what shoegaze specialist is even going to suggest that Loveless might be overrated?). That album is an absolute mess, but still pretty intriguing - a maximalist, production-saturated trip that reminds me of XTRMNTR or the self-titled Broken Social Scene album and having said that, it makes me wonder why I don’t really like it all that much.
As to why I began this series with Serena-Maneesh, maybe they’ve been on my mind more after Eli Enis’ recent Shoegaze State of the Union Address at Stereogum. It’s an incredible piece, thoroughly and lovingly researched, I know that Eli has put in serious work over the past decade. Yet, I found it kinda shocking that I finished reading and felt pretty demoralized - one of my favorite genres is in incredible health from a cultural standpoint and yet, it’s largely due to TikTok, which is proving to be a final boss of music writing that I just can’t beat.
Eli has been much more bullish on bands like They Are Gutting a Body of Water and full body 2 and Feeble Little Horse that I’d describe as “post-Spirit of the Beehive,” a style of shoegaze that I’ve come to identify with tape-warping effects, harsh production and a standoffish relationship with melody (and fwiw, I like SOTB but feel like their massive influence on Philly bands might be a net negative at this point). But I got the sense that these bands have hit their commercial/critical ceiling and it struck me as a parallel to what happened in 2016 with the emo revival; having spent years and years trying to hype up the bands that I felt were doing something innovative and progressive with the genre, it turns out that was all prelude to Lil Peep and Juice WRLD, swaggy (and ultimately doomed) acts who were innovative in their own way, but far more suited to pop audiences reared on social media and emo as an adjective rather than an actual subculture.
This part really stood out to me…
The swaggering velocity of big-room rock also has an indelible thumbprint on Wisp’s pounding “Your Face,” and that strain of shoegaze, while maybe foreign to listeners whose genre reference points are the docile Slowdive and blissful Lush, is especially popular with the TikTok-era crowd. Beyond Deftones, modern nu-gaze bands like Fleshwater and Glare are popping off, and so are their direct ancestors from the early 2010s, when this convergence of brooding grunge riffs and chiming shoegaze effects made an unexpected return in the American underground. Both Basement and Superheaven (who quannnic name as an influence) are experiencing a retroactive resurgence thanks to their 10-year-old songs going TikTok viral, “Covet” and “Youngest Daughter,” respectively. (“Youngest Daughter,” released in 2013 when Superheaven were headlining 250-cap rooms at best, now sits at #3 on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart.) Neither are shoegaze, exactly, but they inform the angsty snarl of Fleshwater and Narrow Head — all part of the TikTok-era alt-rock soup that Deftones, Midwest emo, hardcore, Paramore circa “Decode,” and now shoegaze are simmering in.
If shoegaze in 2023 sounds sorta like Deftones and Midwest emo and you can be subject to a major label bidding war by ripping off Duster, why isn’t this music hitting for me? I’ve been trying to make the case for Deftones as the best shoegaze band of the 2000s and these new acts are specifically referencing “Rosemary” and “Cherry Waves” and “Sextape”! But the difference here - as it was with Serena-Maneesh - comes back to swag.
Even at their lowest moments, Deftones were swaggy as fuck throughout the 2000s but they were also sorta uncool and ridiculous - you can be both, and in their case, it’s a byproduct of their unfulfilled pretensions and lack of total self-awareness. I brought up White Pony as a sort of model for blink-182’s “art” album, i.e., an “art” album made by people who aren’t intrinsically arty. The lore would have you believe that Chino and Chi and Abe and Stef were spending the entire recording process of White Pony doing blow and strippers and partying at the Rumours house, which they sorta were. But they were also driving their producer nuts because they spent so much time playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
They were trying to be Sade and Hum at a time when that made absolutely no sense at all, but now if you’re copying Deftones, it’s understood to be cool. It’s a cheat code. And so with so many bands that sound exactly like some of my favorite bands of all time, there’s no challenge, no risk, no sense that their swag is so different, that they’ll get killed (fwiw, DIIV and Nothing - swaggy, but I feel a little guilty about how much that might be code word for “druggy”). And with Serena-Maneesh, there’s plenty of music that sounded like it then and now, but we’re here Remember Some Guys because none of them would dare dress like pirates.
I got what you meant by about the time that “Beehiver II” came on. This was a lot more Krautrock than I expected from what you wrote! I don’t think Krautrock translates well to Tik Tok, it just takes too damn long to come around to its point.