School of Seven Bells

Disconnect from Desire (Ghostly International/Vagrant)

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: July 13th, 2010 | 1:00pm

It was writer Edgar Allan Poe, undoubtedly a fan of the music of Stephen Foster (“Nelly Was a Lady!”) and Samuel Lover (“Give Me My Arrows and Give Me My Bow!”) who wrote in a poem, “Keeping time, time, time / In a sort of Runic rhyme / To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells.” He obviously wasn’t listening to School of Seven Bells at the time, but he very well could have been. Why? Because the band’s new album, Disconnect from Desire, musically wells with ringing truth in its lyrics and keeps time with a fizzy dream pop that’ll make listeners sway (perhaps even if you’re a long dead, opium-addled horror writer).

Busting out in 2008 with Alpinisms, the school is back in session with the same musical confections that worked so well in that debut album. With Benjamin Curtis (Secret Machines) and twin sisters Claudia and Alejandra Deheza (On!Air!Library!), the band plays ten tracks that orbit around the ethereal voices of the women and the blissed out musicianship of Curtis and company. Similar to Phantogram, Nedry, and their ilk, the band coalesces cerebral lyrics over jagged beats and smooth voices over jumpy synthesizers that work, perhaps, too well. It’s almost to the point with the album that when a listener plays all ten tracks, they may think it just one track broken into parts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that the band is skilled and honed in on one particular thing—making music the way they want to and giving, musically speaking, arrows and bows to emboldened fans.

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School of Seven Bells official Web site

School of Seven Bells MySpace page

Ghostly International Records

Vagrant Records