From Sky To Ground

School of Seven Bells “Windstorm”

Upon hearing School of Seven Bells’ second album, my first impression was that they were wise to drop the haziness and shoegazing, since they didn’t need it and there are too many young musicians masking their timidity and weak skills in that sound. However, when I revisited their first record, it was all sharper and more polished than I had remembered. There’s nothing blurred or muted about Disconnect From Desire — the band is still dreamy, but there’s no soft-focus on this beauty. The vocals are up front in the mix, the singing is confident but not showy. It makes me think of when you see artistic nude shots of fashion models, and their nakedness is so matter of fact and devoid of vulnerability or need to appear particularly sexy. Their body is just there, a natural state that seems totally unnatural in the absence of social convention and the neuroses that go along with it. “Windstorm”, like most everything else the band does, projects a clear-eyed calm in the middle of an arrangement that implies wide-scale drama. They sound enlightened and peaceful, but it seems almost non-human, like the emotional equivalent of a sculpted body shot in crisp black and white. It’s striking in its lovely coldness.

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