Music Banter

School of Seven Bells, who I’ve previously discussed on here, back when this blog had no pictures or nothin’ have a new record in the can, so it seems. It’s going to be called ‘Disconnect From Desire’ and it’ll be out in July. They’ve given Stereogum an exclusive on one of the new tracks, Babelonia.

Like some kind of musical blog-parasite, here I am reposting that link. From that page there’s a widget where you can download it, if you’re happy to give them your email address. I would, if I were you- the more spam I get sent about these guys, the better.

In a lot of ways, the track is more of the same- the same sort of blissful grooving guitar, pristine female vocals and sense of inexorable, gliding momentum. It makes me think of looking out of train windows, and watching the countryside spin past, which is exactly what this kind of music should do.

The obvious touchstones you expect from this band are there- the guitars still sound blessed by the hand of Kevin Shields, but there are other bits and bobs thrown into the mix- the ‘chorus’ melody sounds quite like the sort of thing Stereolab would have done, only it’s behind a few strange layers of effects. It’s all very nice. There’s also a few bleeps and such at the start of the track that are a nice opening touch.

Overall, then, School of Seven Bells haven’t done much here to progress, or take their overall sound much further out there- they’ve simply plowed their furrow, and made a piece of music that’s a little slicker than something on ‘Alpinism.’ Nothing that remarkable about it, but it’s well-done and a good sign of more pleasant, blissful listening times to come, when their album comes out in July.

I love Shoegaze. I said so a while back, remember? I love everything about the genre. I love the massive walls of feedback, the whispered vocals which are often kind of about sex, or what taking drugs might feel like. Of course no shoegazer, apart from Jason Pearce of Spiritualized, was ever actually brave enough to take drugs, but they listen to shoegaze, so they don’t have to. You can realise this is true if you just consider the fact that to get drugs, a Shoegazer would have actually had to interact with someone. Can you imagine Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine stepping outside his front door and actually talking to a dealer? Thought not. No, it’s physically impossible. Shoegaze was all about introspection, which makes me, as a nerd with a laptop, wedded to the indoors, the prime audience for such a music. And the audience is expanding, too.

In this modern twitter-age, the internet and social media have created a whole generation of facile Emily Dickinsons sitting at their computers typing drivel to each other, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never really have to interact with anyone, not ever. Millions upon millions of shy flowers, endlessly reading Pitchfork and deciding whether or not to put Slowdive onto their playlist on Last.Fm. I blame the Cathode Ray babysitter- it’s clearly all television’s fault.

Still, I think it’s a good thing. We’ve got a generation of people, socially crippled and unable to deal with the outside world, but at least we’ve got a willing audience for music like School of Seven Bells who are kind of like a shoegaze band grown in a lab from the dead skin cells swept up from the studio floor during the making of Loveless, only nice, and not manky like that sounds. They’re on Sonic Cathedral Records, one of them was in Secret Machines, and their singer is a lucid dreamer, which is a VERY shoegaze thing, and unusually for a shoegaze (or Newgaze, which is apparently what you’re supposed to call it these days) band, they write their lyrics first. Remarkable. You can even hear the words, which is something that purists will frown at a bit, but I can forgive them this. I listen to them obsessively, and I think you should too.