Disponible en cd.
Praise for debut Alpinisms:
“Top 9 bands for 2009” Mojo
“Quite otherworldly and something very special indeed” 9/10 NME
"This is a lesson in tender restraint you won't want to miss" 4/5 The Guardian
“Brooding yet beautiful electronica” Dazed & Confused
"They conjure up something quite magical" 4/5 The Sun
“Heavenly dream-pop” Sunday Times
"They manage to move mountains with their blissful slow-building ditties"
4/6 Time Out
“A frenzy of blessed out plinks and plonks, cascading over dreamy, otherworldly vocals” The Fly
“Epic pop” 8/10 Loud & Quiet
“Impossible to pigeonhole” 4/5 Mixmag
“A sublime piece of work” Clash
"Gorgeous, warm caresses of harmonic, futuristic beauty to melt the chilliest hearts" 4/5 Metro
School of Seven Bells return with their second album, Disconnect from Desire on Full Time Hobby on July 12. Their majestic debut Alpinisms was released to huge acclaim last year, with Mojo pronouncing them one of their top nine new bands for 2009 (as well as a nomination for a Mojo Honours award for ‘best breakthrough’) 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 and given a glorious multicoloured heft 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 and borne 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 layered 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, 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 spikey synths, to the dreamy but heartbreaking ballad ‘I.L.U.’ with the formidably subtle guitar refrain from Ben, 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 further refracted and School of Seven Bells have made a musical quantum leap.