School of Seven Bells | Disconnect From Desire

Most Likely To: create an armchair dreamscape to rival, but not best, Cocteau Twins.

School of Seven Bells had all of the right ingredients for a successful Brooklyn-based band. A nifty abbreviation: SVIIB. Its members already possessed indie cred thanks to stints in other bands. Guitarist Benjamin Curtis of Secret Machines joined with identical twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Dejeza, ex-on!air!library!, who both sing and play bass and keyboards respectively. The band’s name came from watching a PBS documentary (the subject was a mythical school for pickpockets).

Yet pretty much everything I love about SVIIB can be traced to one source: Cocteau Twins. I doubt the band is in the dark about this connection since they recruited former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie to remix their debut single, “My Cabal,” from 2008′s Alpinism. There’s no question that School of Seven Bells could do a lot worse than aping the Cocteau Twins, a band so celebrated in Donnybrook Manor, that our own Benny St. Maur honored them and a fellow reviewer saw fit, and rightly so, to review a recent Elizabeth Fraser EP that was really just a glorified maxi-single. It’s worth noting that School of Seven Bells needs two genetically identical people to even approximate Fraser’s spectacular pipes.

But since a Cocteau Twins reunion is about as bloody likely as a Morrissey/Marr reconciliation, I’m going to set my feelings aside, and review Disconnect From Desire on its own merits, while trying to ignore the distractingly pleasant feeling of déjà vu listening to it brings me.

School of Seven Bells makes music for the Superego. An ad hoc survey of the band’s fan base would likely find IQ scores skewed to the right of the mean, as well as an overrepresentation of erudite but useless graduate degrees and, of course, hipster glasses. Rather than being defined by a hooky riff or memorable lyric, their songs are holistic and engrossing. Disconnect From Desire takes the listener on an audio journey that rivals a good documentary film. For the album’s duration, one is elsewhere; in musical world whose offerings would be gaudy were they any less fluid.

Disconnect From Desire’s cerebrum-filling melodies are so all encompassing that the songs don’t as much sever desire as wash it away in a flood of intricately layered song.

Watch the video for “Windstorm” by School of Seven Bells: