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School Of Seven Bells Return With Second Album
July sees a run of UK lives dates, including a headline show at London’s Scala and an appearance at Latitude festival.
School of Seven Bells majestic debut ‘Alpinisms’ was released to huge acclaim last year, with Mojo naming them one of their top nine new bands for 2009 (as well as a nomination for a Mojo Honours award for ‘Breakthrough Act’) and hitting many albums of the year lists, including the NME who called it “pop music of the future”. The band have toured extensively since, supporting the likes of Bat for Lashes and White Lies as well as appearances at ATP including the My Bloody Valentine-curated event last December.
‘Disconnect from Desire’ is a bold musical step forward for the band and sees them adopt a bigger, more emphatic sound. All the elements that make up SVIIB are boosted, given a multicoloured hue and the songs surge as a result. ‘Disconnect from Desire’ is the sound of a band bursting out from the insular and mythical world of ‘Alpinisms’ and engaging with a less abstract and more personal reality. Where ‘Alpinisms’ was made up of eleven beautifully crafted songs telling stories all intertwined around a specific theme, the new record extends those ideas and characters into the real world, focusing more on the bands own experiences of changing relationships and fading love.
The music has lost none of its dreamy qualities however, with each song drawing you into its own multi-layered and hypnotic world. Produced by Benjamin Curtis himself, and mixed by Jack Joseph Puig, ‘Disconnect from Desire’ is made up of ten perfectly realised and refined pop gems. One such tune is opening track and forthcoming single ‘Windstorm’, with its instantly addictive melody backed by the Bells signature atmospheric layering of ghostly electronics and Alejandra and Claudia Deheza’s bewitching harmonies. Beginning with a screeching electronic chant, it marks out fresh terrain and one of the main messages of ‘Disconnect from Desire’, the feeling of waking up and shaking off routine, blowing out the cobwebs and dealing with change; “when the fire's burnin’ from sky to ground / swing my weight around / begin the windstorm”.
What follows is a journey through a whole range of musical motifs and emotions, from the ecstatic dance floor inducing ‘Dust Devil’ with its incessant drums and spiky synths, to the dreamy but heartbreaking ballad ‘I.L.U.’ with the formidably subtle guitar refrain from Benjamin, ‘Disconnect from Desire’ never falls short of the pop bull’s-eye. Old themes are expanded on with ‘Babelonia’, ‘Joviann’ and ‘Camarilla’, all names of Bells characters from Alpinisms, but this doesn’t stunt the band’s growth in any way, as is proven on ‘Bye Bye Bye’ with its assured evocation “when you look back you'll turn into / this I promise you / a pillar of salt that I’ll walk through and I’ll scatter you / into the wind back to the day we met where you'll settle into a standing pile of stones / I’ll skip across that ocean we knew’.
Pop’s purpose has been refracted further and School of Seven Bells have made a musical quantum leap.
UK Dates:
Sat 17 July Latitude Festival
Sun 18 July Bristol Thekla
Mon 19 July Manchester Ruby Lounge
Tues 20 July London Scala