School of Seven Bells
Disconnect from Desire
Vagrant, 2010
In addition to doing straight-up spoofs of specific songs, like “Eat It” or “Like a Surgeon,” “Weird Al” Yankovic does stuff he calls “style parodies.” These don’t sound like any one particular song from a given band or genre, they sound like the band or genre in general. “Dare to Be Stupid,” in which Al out-Devos Devo, is a style parody–and also a damn good song. The two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive at all.
“Real” bands have always known this. I could rattle off designer-imposter tracks that equal or better the work of their inspiration all the livelong day, from John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band recording the best song Bruce Springsteen never wrote in “On the Dark Side” to John Fogerty getting a run for his chooglin’ money by the Hollies and “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” (or Paul McCartney and “Band on the Run,” for that matter).
More recently, James Murphy took his Berlin-records fandom to newly literal lengths. On LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening he makes no effort to cloak the 1:1 correspondence between “Somebody’s Calling Me” and Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” or between “All I Want” and David Bowie’s “‘Heroes’.” Which is fine–heck, Bowie did it to himself on “Teenage Wildlife,” simply subbing in King Crimson’s Adrian Belew for King Crimson’s Robert Fripp. But for my money it’s the “style parody” style of “I Can Change” that works best. Here there’s no apples-to-apples comparison to distract or detract from Murphy’s work. Sure, you can hear unmistakable echoes of New Wave classics–the rhythmical bounce of “Fashion,” the rinkydink keyboard bleeps of “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” the lyrical paranoia of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, the two-chord trot of “Messages,” et cetera et cetera. You’re supposed to hear them, in fact; it’s more than just referencing a sound a la Goldfrapp, it makes you think “Man, what song does this sound like? It’s on the tip of my tongue…” But ultimately it’s not any one thing, it’s its own new thing, sturdily constructed from the blueprints of old things. It’s easy to sound like the stuff you like; it’s harder, and much more rewarding, to feel like it.
That’s what I’m getting from Disconnect from Desire, the new album from School of Seven Bells. The key here is that the sound that Benjamin Curtis and the Sisters Deheza are working with is one of the most returned to, sought after, downright hungered for sounds around: the danceable dreamscape of My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon.” I mean, people talk about looking for stuff that lives up to Loveless like junkies looking for a fix or ufologists desperate for a close encounter; if I myself had a nickel for every time I got stuck in a “cathedrals of sound” k-hole with “Vapour Trail” on repeat for eight hours, I’d have at least fifty, fifty-five cents. The problem, though, is that a sound as distinct as Kevin Shields’s or the 4AD catalog’s is so easy to mimic that you can coast on that mimicry. You hit everything on your swirly/sexy/shoegazey checklist and call it a day.
School of Seven Bells, on the other hand, does things differently enough to be able to afford, and make the most of, those stylistic similarities. For starters, these aren’t the murmured coos of Bilinda Butcher or the private languages of Liz Frazer–Alejandra and Claudia Deheza’s vocal harmonies are crisp, clear, and foregrounded, rhythmically emphasizing individual words and syllables. It’s an approach built to match the lyrics, which are equally economical and direct. “I want you / To know that / I loved you” goes the simple, sad chorus of “I L U”–three phrases, three words per phrase, all delivered clean and cool. In “Camarilla,” the vocal melody descends downward over the phrase “Life is luck of the draw then a battle of…wits”–the “of” sustained over several notes, then a pause, then “wits” delivered with a brief flash of harmony. You’d lose not just the wordplay if you drenched everything in reverb, you’d lose SVIIB’s unique juxtaposition of the grand romanticism of their sound with the relatable observations of their lyrics and the simplicity of their delivery.
Then there’s the sound itself. It too is dialed way down from the cacophonous guitar layers of Loveless. There are certainly big warm drones and sudden peals and notes that seem to echo out into some giant cavern, but it’s brought to life with beats more often than not. “Dust Devils” could strut comfortably alongside a poppy early ’90s rave act, “Heart Is Strange” pounds, “Babelonia” careens (at one point coming as close as anything on the album to referencing a specific song, Wire’s “Ahead”), “Bye Bye Bye” has a hook that’s practically freestyle. It’s as much synthpop as shoegaze, and it doesn’t just complement the pretty voices, it opens up the reference point to a whole time frame. This is the sound of, oh let’s say 1987 to 1991, pulling in mostly lost alt-pop sounds from Lush to Shakespear’s Sister to Sunscreem.
This all makes it sound like a clinical process of addition and subtraction, but the result is more alchemy than algebra. It makes me hungry for not just this sound in general but School of Seven Bells’ particular use of it. Cranking the “Be My Baby” beat of their “Joviann” makes me want to hear “Love’s Easy Tears,” yes, but mostly it makes me want to hear “Joviann” again and again. I want to feel that pounding, hear that guitar twinkle on up into the ionosphere, soak in the romantic mystery of that soaring, knowing refrain of “I used to know, I used to love….” I couldn’t do that if this were the Creation Records equivalent of “White & Nerdy.” They had to change things enough to successfully access that same space.