Ben Seretan Allora (Highlighter Yellow)

Ben Seretan has an album that he’s only ever referred to as his “insane Italy record," but it’s called Allora — an expressive Venetian catchall that translates to "at that time." It’s a fitting banner over a record indelibly tied to the circumstances of its capturing: it’s summer 2019, and Ben and his band (bassist Nico Hedley and drummer Dan Knishkowy) go through with a planned tour to Italy amidst their vivid grief over the recent passing of a close friend. The band flies overseas, the tour falls apart. The band responds by leaning into the country's rose-colored revelry – sweating in the Mediterranean heat, smoking cigarettes on trains, biting into bacchanalian fruit. Instead of playing shows, they head to a stone farmhouse in the hills above Venice with legendary psych-rocker and producer Matt Bordin and burn Allora to tape in three days. Three days. The furor of this record makes that fact seem appropriate, but the grace notes that fill its corners make it feel impossible. The utter chaos this record exudes is there for a reason. Its borderless color is unsurprising if you know Ben Seretan’s catalog — there's a 24-hour drone record, his weekly project of writing over a thousand words and publishing an accompanying track (My Big Break), and a set of improvisational piano duets with the white-noise roar of Appalachian nature (Cicada Waves). Drop a needle into the middle of any of it and you'll be disarmed. The same goes for Allora, jagged as it may be on its face — but follow the coarse, winding path of any track and you'll be met with the same springs of hymnlike tenderness. Over and again Ben and his band march arm in arm from tearful elegy to dancefloor eulogy — neither cancels the other.