Emil Nikolaisen, frontman of Serena-Maneesh, can recall the moment as a child, when the germ of the notion of the group first appeared in his head. “It was when my music teacher played “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground to a class of innocent, ignorant little kids. A very rare thing to do in a small
village in the Norwegian countryside. I was caught in a moment, completely captured, with no reservation. I had no idea whether I was fascinated or scared. The only thing I knew was that I felt it was very dark, but EXTREMELY real. It was like reality caught to tape.”

If you’re going to be plunged, in your formative years, into the primal, pitch tar essence of rock’n’roll, then the central NYC Velvets and the remote, edge-of-the worldness of Norway make for a surprisingly potent combination of opposites. Although even among his fellow Norwegians, Nikolaisen felt a sense of apart-ness.

“My sisters and I come from a big family living a sparse life in the midst of materialistic small-city people,” he explains.” We were half Finnish and our mom took us to school in a trolley attached to her bike.When moving in to the big city I still felt like this need to seek out similar, outcast companions. Of course we acknowledge our roots in modern rock history but I don’t think we should under estimate the role of Norwegian/Finnish blood and a yearning for a different angle. In Norway, I found a lot of people perfectly seated in this slightly numb and quite self obsessed middle ground music scene. I had a lot to learn but was irritated by this mentality – ‘this works so why do it differently’?”

Serena-Maneesh are on an undoubted quest for difference, yet they could be considered an attempt of Nikolaisen to return through the mists to that original moment of awestruck epiphany in that Norwegian classroom at the hands of that improbably enlightened schoolteacher. Their ethereal yet blistering, self-titled debut album suggests, among many other things, a journey back into the black hole centre of rock music itself – backward to the Stooges and the Velvets, yet via, among others, Krautrock and Umagumma-period Pink Floyd.

These are subtly alluded to, however, rather than merely regurgitated. This is music that takes in a great deal – add to the list early blues, Norwegian folk music and Sun Ra among others, yet is a wonderfully mobile, weightless affair, all wisps, veils, webs and miasmas.

That 21st century indie rock is largely a dull, earthbound, retrograde affair, another fixture in the shopping mall, has not escaped Nikolaisen. “The sound of today’s so called indie rock in general has gotten boring. The modern conventions many people subscribe to I really don’t understand. Like a slightly sophisticated pre-worn vintage T- shirt you get at some urban outfitter.” Serena-Maneesh, by contrast, are timeless, elusive. They tap into a sort of natural, omnipresent electricity in the air, past, present and future. Their debut album at once rejuvenates rock and reminds you of its great, magnificent age.

Despite Nikolaisen’s undoubted status as Maneesh’s head musician, and the personalised, impassioned compositions and soundworld that make up the album, this is no private, bedroom concoction. Serena-Maneesh have seen the world. It was completed over six months in Chicago, New York, Oslo and Stockholm. The fingerprints of fellow collaborators are all over it, including remixer Martin Bisi (Swans, Sonic Youth), Nikolaisen’s sisters Elvira and Hilma, friends such as Sufjan Stevens and Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile. Lina Holström supplies female vocals, Eivind Schou plays violin, Sondre Tristan Mittun guitar and Tommy Akerholt drums. There are guest contributions too from Mental Destruction’s Samuel Durling (Indian samples) and Harald Froland of Jaga Jazzist (guitar), plus a host of others providing tambourine, distortion, harmonica, all bobbing about half-submerged in the rock’n’roll of the cauldron’s mix.

The album begins with “Drain Cosmetics”, accorded Single Of The Week status by the UK Guardian. Amid, bittersweet, black crushed velvet and dungeon reverb, Nikolaisen can be heard calling out to the chink of sky visible through a chink in the wall to “break my chains”. It’s typically paradoxical, all bright blue Promethean energy and splendid, gothic gloom. “I’ve always loved tension,” explains Nikolaisen. “’Opposites’ battle each other. Within harmony in melody and chord, between the sexes, the dry and the liquid, the dynamics, at obvious or subtle levels. I love the constant danger of things falling apart.”

That’s Serena-Maneesh in a crumbling nutshell – richly woven yet constantly courting the danger of coming undone, of disintegration. The rich musical mix, guided by Nikolaisen’s instinctive sleight of hand makes for a constant shadowplay of distortion and revelation, as on “Selina’s Melodie Fountain”, its multiple layers peeling and collapsing away into sudden gorges of white noise, before returning to life in hallucinatory form.

The ascending, accelerating “Un-Deux” is followed by “Candelighted”, whose twisting, laser trajectory is a 21st century take on Can’s early 70s journeys into inner space. Here, as on “Beehiver II” and the provocatively fatale “Her Name Is Suicide”, the lyrics seem to drown in their own sublime effluent, whispered, semi-formed, even self-debasing forays into the darkness. Nikolaisen adviser’s listeners, when tackling Serena-Maneesh’s lyrics, to imagine finding themselves “in a boat thrown through a rough battling storm, lightning and thunder. Experience hearing the sound of the words through this ‘veil’, appearing as a whole experience. If you give them a chance you might arrive at a place where you get a picture.”

“Sapphire Eyes” is another bipolar experience, a primitive snare marking time as the track morphs from blue-eyed pop into mascara-blinded oblivion. Serena-Maneesh are picking up on ideas only touched on and too quickly discarded back in the Eighties, with the advantage of new twists, turns and technology – and, of course, a multiple approach which is applied to every last track of the album. “There’s lots of ways to deliver a certain note or notes,” observes Nikolaisen. “It could be the distorted violin wailing, it could be guitars, organ, cello, voice… the context and possibilities are endless.”

“Don’t Come Down Here” represents relative acoustic respite, before submitting to another tempest of feedback and radioactive wipeout. “Chorale Lick” sees Nikolaisen lashed to the mast once more, “stripped naked like that lonely fall”, before the limpid hiatus of “Simplicity”, whose vibes resound like the slow raindrops that follow a storm. But just when you think Serena-Maneesh might reasonably be blown out, comes the 12 minute finale, “Your Blood In Mine”, the realisation of all Serena-Maneesh’s ambitions, a wailing, gigantic tide of guitar and processed noise, a backward, dirty, foaming river of rock history and psychedelia, Faust, Floyd and back to the blues source where it’s swallowed up, with a solo piano resounding in a stunned, meandering fashion at the wake, seeing the album out.

First released only in Norway in August 2005, Serena-Maneesh made an immediate impact, outshining Franz Ferdinand in Pitchfork’s top 50 albums selection, earning them a Norwegian Grammy nomination and a full European tour supporting The Dandy Warhol’s. Serena-Maneesh have just recently returned from a hugely successful month long head-lining tour of the USA including three mind-blowing sets at SXSW which confirmed them as one of this years highlights at the event (with glowing reports in NME’s SXSW Rador Special), all this before anyone’s even begun to give them the push they deserve.

For those looking for a giant step beyond the nearly done-to-death post punk revival, the magnificent Serena-Maneesh are timeless and timely. But they’re also out of time. “We’re with the nomads, gypsies and Indians”, says Nikolaisen. “We find ourselves somehow as strangers to our place and era.“

They will not, however, be strangers for long….

DAVID STUBBS