School of Seven Bells
Disconnect from Desire
Vagrant Records
If your first impression of School of Seven Bells’ second album, Disconnect from Desire is, “Blah, this is nothing more than the placid alterna-pop of Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Building a Mystery’ ten times over,” do yourself a favor and listen a little more closely. For while twin vocalists, Claudia and Alejandra Deheza, are stuck on their elegant and elongated, dreamy vocals, ex-Secret Machine man, Ben Curtis, is busy in the background using his space-rock background to save these tracks from becoming aimless flutter. There’s hints of Eno’s ambient work and the German chuggle of krautrock, a spackling of guitar crunch and coarsened bits of keyboard. Now if we could get Curtis to go with a little more volume (More of the coarse and cruncy bits, please), and the Deheza’s to sing with a bit more range and dynamics, we’d really have something — A dream-pop record for the future. 6 out of 10 on The Rockometer.
