Ben Seretan Rejoices, Grieves and Transforms on Allora

For five years, Ben Seretan—a musician who lives in the Climax hamlet of Coxsackie, New York—has been calling Allora his “insane Italy record.” The word “allora” translates to “at that time” in Italian; Seretan and his band (Nico Hedley, Dan Knishkowy, Matt Bordin) made the thing on tape in Montebelluna across three July days in 2019. This idea that Seretan perhaps lingered across the cobblestone of bel paese, busking in Lugano and taking baths in apricots and sleeping on mattresses of focaccia the summer before summer couldn’t quite exist for millions of us—it all sounds so wonderful and one-of-a-kind and so long ago. Allora sounds like only two of those things, as Seretan shepherds his listeners through seven songs that, while they are already, technically, dated, arrive fresh and bewitching. It’s a guitar record that refuses to be categorized as such. Instead, Allora is one with the flora and fauna of drones, mangled horns and stone-cold rock ‘n’ roll. It answers to detail-driven emotion and blankets itself in communal tenderness.

Allora begins in a place of rapture, as the eight-minute “New Air” blisters through the frequencies like a Sonic Youth breakdown, before giving way to flutters of chord surfing. A three-minute introduction of noise, fragmented soloing and anticipation becomes a sensory overload, until Seretan plugs an onslaught of imagery into a heat-seeking missile of rock ‘n’ roll. “Cough drops and bumblebees in syrup / Bare feet resting on the window / When we drove to San Diego / We swam in every flooded valley,” he sings. It’s poetry wedged between hard-nosed, chameleonic guitar postures. Seretan is the kind of musician who isn’t afraid to keep you on your toes. The music he makes flutters between color—shape-shifting between indie rock, experimental and gauzy, metallic, spell-binding chatter. “New Air” hits a climax over and over, just as Wilco did on a song like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” 20 years ago. And then, all of a sudden, the loudness falls away and reveals Seretan alone, reckoning with what fills his lungs: “Oh, we breathe new air for the first time / Build a stone wall in my rib cage / So long, glad I got to know ya / Burn your postcards in the kitchen sink.”

“Climb the Ladder,” a song I’ve had on repeat since I first heard it, flashes a touch of Radiohead scribblings before retreating back to the safety of Ben Seretan’s four-or-five-genres-at-once sound. It sounds like two or three songs stitched together perfectly, and Seretan hangs on to his muse here, too, singing about “two feet to your open arms” and “10 foot to the bottom of the pond.” “Climb the Ladder” is a track about finding the courage to tell someone—a stranger, a lover, a friend, anyone—how you really feel about them and how you really feel about everything else. Seretan warbles in gibberish for half-a-minute before erupting into a punk-rock coda and unfurling into a repetition of “climb the ladder in the water” until it becomes blurred in all of his nasally, chaotic beauty.

“Bend” likewise never rests for a moment, even when it opens with tender guitar strums and Seretan humming about “flowers on the road, bending toward the sun.” “I could hear you singing for the last time,” he admits. “I could hear you grinning, spinning out the line.” Bend” arrives like a textbook guitar cut packed by chords that flirt with the kind of cowboy bravado you might not expect from an East Coaster. And yet, all of it works and all of it soars. Seretan’s lyricism is minimal, whispered like he’s reciting a notebook that also happens to have a colossal, crooning quake of rock ‘n’ roll thundering between its pages. “Bending with the weight of it, what I want could fill the world up,” Seretan sings out, before tracing his own mantra: “I will bend, not break.”