by Aly Muilenburg (@purityolympics)
Five years ago, Ben Seretan was in Italy. At that time, he was a bit lost. At that time, a tour had fallen through. At that time, a dear friend had died. At that time, he had three days in a stone countryside farmhouse to make a record. Allora, the new full-length from the New York songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, is a snapshot. For someone known just as much for painting ambient sunscapes and making 24-hour albums as for piecing together roaring, spiritual, overwhelming rock songs with chorales of friends, Allora is his most unyielding and raw release to date.
Across multiple LPs, extended compilations, and magnanimous collaborations — he’s credited solely with “drone” on Cassandra Jenkins’ 2021 breakout masterpiece — the throughline is subtle. Allora begins with an eruptive three-minute guitar solo; sandhills music, with rainfall and chimes; his 2014 self-titled album, with a burbling chord organ. Without wasting time and listing further opening sounds, you’ll soon find that nothing repeats itself. Seretan’s voice, a throaty, clarion tenor hovering between a whisper and a rumble, is the soloist standing in front of the choir. The words “ecstatic joy” are the closest thing to a name for the conduit running through his multifaceted music, so much so that they’re tattooed on his chest. The frenzied tidal wave of ecstasy is terrifying, paralyzing, freeing; bursts of joy are fleeting, leaving beloved scars in our memories. Each second is a time capsule, buried before the next one closes.
The self-described “insane Italy record” was completed over the same period of time that Jesus spent in the tomb. Seretan is remarkably unfrivolous, never looking back and trusting time to have his back. Songs don’t have choruses; rather, they have mantras. The bones were excavated and sandblasted in the moment, backed by longtime bandmates Nico Hedley and Dan Knishkowy on bass and drums, respectively. A no-frills approach was honed with Matteo Bordin, an Italian engineer and musician with a psychedelic two-decade portfolio. The here-and-now drives recklessly and with delight, shifting gears several times per song, refusing any absent glances into the rearview.
It’s ballsy to have lead single or album opener be an extended, jammy, catharsis cannonball. “New Air,” eight minutes of emotions and guitars, is all of the above, and it used to be even longer. Digging through the depths of Bandcamp eventually reveals a slower, more pensive rendition from 2012 that tacks on an additional minute to the runtime. The present version is as propulsive as gulps of relieved oxygen and synthesizes every aspect of Seretan’s music to date. A resilient and synchronized rhythm section serves as its gravity, around which Seretan’s fuzzed-out guitar-hero solos can spiral and collapse. Droning undercurrents may be out of sight, but without their relentless push, there would be nothing to carry the hums, thrums, buzzes, and squalls forward on railways of light. Momentum rises and falls with lyrical repetition, sometimes dissonant, sometimes choppy and throttling. Every wail of “we breathe / new air for the first time” exalts the gift of each gasp; ragged conviction reassures their spontaneity, one after the other. There is thunder in our hearts and Seretan manages to let it out, cracking and booming and crying, enlightening us of the possibilities without quite giving an instructional demonstration. This is transcendent indie rock, not chemistry class.
Heaviness pushes to the forefront on Allora despite the elation, sometimes explicitly, as through chaotic skronking saxophone from Bordin on “Free,” a second eight-minute stunner. Greater uncertainty and dissonance fuel Knishkowy’s thudding drums and Seretan’s guitars, even before professing to be “worried that I was / free” in a warble. Freedom isn’t only meant to be sought; it sows anxiety with equal abundance. “Jubilation Blues” conveys the album’s Janus-esque, oppositional path into the future neatly with its title and depictions of a sweaty, High Life-filled dancefloor.
Side B seems to ease forward with “Small Times,” the album’s most directly grief-laden track. Devra Freelander, a New York sculptor and friend who sang on 2020’s Youth Pastoral, passed away two weeks before recording. Falsetto and keys, quiet reflection, all coalesce in hymnic reverence. “I want you around” is the core lyric around which the rest of the song orbits. It’s a perforated intake of breath, coming together in situ as Freelander’s absence drapes itself over the band like a woolen blanket.
The immediate translation of allora comes directly from the Latin ad illa horam — literally, “at that time.” Its origins have muddled and broadened into the present Venetian use as an interstitial word, buying time mid-sentence. Allora, the album, retains this multitudinous, almost contradictory, essence. It captures the breaking yet unbroken immediacy of its creation while simultaneously acknowledging its fleeting nature. At that time, exactly five years before the record’s release, Ben Seretan was in Italy. At this time, he could be anywhere else, carrying each of those moments with him, never leaving them behind.