A Thread For School of Seven Bells Love!

That would actually have made some kind of sense. That DiS review was far more garbled than that.

dying @ that review

it is one hell of a review

A sort of theological reversal of postmodernity, where instead of the inherited fragment there is now something growing from the pile - a global culture, that no longer refers to its antecedents, no longer comes from anywhere, but proliferates like a remix of remixes.

Dude's going to be a hit at grad school.

it's kind of like when lindsay lohan kept misusing the word "adequate", i'm just super-curious as to what he thinks all those words mean

His review of Wildbirds and Peacedrums features the winning line: "Reviewing this as I am from a narrowboat on a welsh canal, I can’t help but notice that watery metaphors abound." Doesn't anyone ever get edited anymore?

hahah what was she using "adequate" to mean?

Never heard the first album and playing the new one for the first time -- it's a really peculiar listen. Reminiscent of A Sunny Day in Glasgow's Ashes Grammar instrumentally and the vocals have a world/foreign tinge even though there's no accent. Something's just OFF in the melodies and chord progressions but those weird moments make it more interesting. If they can pull this off live I'm sure it's amazing.

His review of Wildbirds and Peacedrums features the winning line: "Reviewing this as I am from a narrowboat on a welsh canal, I can’t help but notice that watery metaphors abound."

loooooooool

xpost -- They do pull off the performances of that live very well, it's how the sound is so much more full live, for lack of a better word. That said it seems to depend on the venue as well, the more close (claustrophobic?) a venue, the bigger the impact.

i did see them live--thought they desperately needed a drummer which i guess they have now?

Yup

Ally Deheza often seems to stress sung words on odd syllables. I don't know if this is deliberate, or if it's just to force rhymes to fit the musical meter, but I find it a really interesting and charming vocal tic. It often makes you think about the meaning and intention of word choice, and about what she's choosing to stress, and if that alters the meaning.

It sometimes reminds me of Kristin Hersch - although their voices sound nothing alike, that odd quirk of vocal intonation makes the work of both take on a different dimension.

The one useful point I took from that review is that Disconnect from Desire sounds a bit like Curve, which hadn't struck me before - it has the same stadium-shoegaze quality. He should have left it at that.

But the song I L U is one of the songs that really *doesn't* sound particularly like Curve!

Lord, I never thought they sounded like Curve -- much different vocal quality/emphasis.

hahah what was she using "adequate" to mean?

a few years ago she signed off a drunken open letter to hollywood, sent from her blackberry, "be adequite" (sic). to which the world responded "be literite".

I was thinking more of Heart Is Strange - just the early 90s indie-dance beat, the gothisms and the sheer scale of it rather than a precise similarity.

Might have leapt out at me as a comparison if they were closer in time to that band but there's something different about them that (granted the similarities you note) I can't fully put my finger on. And live I tended to think more of Loop!

The whole dancey beats plus goth plus shoegaze atmospherics (with female vocals) is totally Curve-like. (if it were male vocals, it would be Chapterhouse's second album.)

NOTHING like Loop. Are you mad, Raggett?

I love the fact that drum sound is so dated - you don't really hear that anymore so it takes me right back to my teens.

it's like lush-ious jackson IMO

xxpost -- I ascribe it to Ben fully there, first time through I saw 'em. Huge pulses of feedback throb etc. etc.

And yeah, it just doesn't suggest itself as Curve-like automatically for me as noted. Maybe because there's a slow burn anger in Toni Halliday's singing/lyrics that I'm not sensing here, but Ben's work doesn't make me think of Dean Garcia's either.

In Secret Machines, I could see a Loop-esque thing maybe. But not with SVIIB.

Benjamin is far more of an MBV fanboy than anything else! ;-)

"Babelonia" at 2:33-2:49 basically IS Curve (and a weedwhacker).

Did this get did already?

Sonic Youth and School Of Seven Bells members set for Neu! supergroup

Just listening to a bit of the new one and maybe I said this before but the vocals *really* remind me of Linda Perhacs' multi-tracked singing.

Bye Bye Bye = neat song, btw

Just wanted to post the pic of that drownedinsound reviewer:

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh310/yodelagogo/53769.jpg

Oh shit, I missed this Lusine remix of Half Asleep - kind of lush and chimey in a Pantha du Prince-ish way:

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/School_of_Seven_Bells/track/Half_Asleep_Lusine_Remix

this record needs more guitars and heaviness

im 3 or 4 listens in, and i'd agree with this.

You know I would never ever normally engage in any kind of childish hipster bashing or anything but OH MY GOD I HAVE NEVER HATED ANYONE SO MUCH ON SIGHT IN MY LIFE AS THAT TWUNTISH REVIEWER, I WANT TO SMASH HIS PRETENTIOUSLY HELD CIGARETTE OUT ON HIS NON PRESCRIPTION GLASSES!!!!

lol

seconded!!!

Got mine in the mail today... nice little box and cards, but where is this bonus CD? Not included.

Is that a review or is that someone's thesis statement of an art degree from, like, Camberwell College or something?

I got as far as the top of the second paragraph:

But there is a third moment, and this is perhaps caught in Audrey's dance in the diner of Twin Peaks, where her naïf-fatale eroticism jives to Badalamenti's otherworld. His music exists at the hauntological cusp of big band, as it recedes into those hanging chromatic notes which betray the foreign agent at the heart of David Lynch's estranging of the American familiar.

to be honest, it kinda sounds like SVIIB lyrics.

they should re-record "half-asleep" with the words from this review and call it "voice of harold."

OH MY GOD I HAVE NEVER HATED ANYONE SO MUCH ON SIGHT IN MY LIFE AS THAT TWUNTISH REVIEWER, I WANT TO SMASH HIS PRETENTIOUSLY HELD CIGARETTE OUT ON HIS NON PRESCRIPTION GLASSES!!!!

The collected wit and wisdom of that Twuntish reviewer: h t t p : / / www . danielbyates . com / pop

(unlinked because I don't want him here)

LOL at the opening line of his AFI review:

"When you try and neuter a cat it puts up a fight."

and the closing paragraph from the same review:

"So instead I filmed one of my own turds in slo-mo, epically breaking the surface of the water, proudly pushing its turtlehead up toward the light beyond the bowl. A little blood around the edges, only to signify the cancer of soft-rock guitar in what should be the healthy churning bowels of punk music. I used fake blood, nothing more serious than that."

I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do than read another word of that twuntish review's "work". One of them involves putting mine own eyes out with rusting dogshit-smeared pruning secateurs.

And no, I didn't get a "bonus CD" either. Boo hoo.

Ah, 50 minutes long... perfect for a nice run. I'll try it on Friday.

Oh! And that thing with NEU! as performed by Michael Rother with Benjamin Curtis (and Steve Shelley and some other peeps)... not happened yet, but happening in October...

http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=11079

(Though I should probably go revive a NEU! or a Krautrock thread for wider interest.)

Sounds like everyone who is really into this = everyone who has seen them live. That must be the setting in which the MBV comparisons shine, because this record does not have much edge and really not a whole lot of atmosphere either. This album's not bad but it's very tidy and clean.

I know Ben can play huge, based on Secret Machines albums and live show. His presence feels very played down here.

I loved them before I ever saw them live - but that was based on some (far rougher sounding) demos that Benjamin had given me pre- Alpinisms.

That said, I don't *mind* the pop sheen. I really like pop sheen and glossiness and that Aurally Enhanced shiny candy sound.

I should probably get off this thread before every post I make just turns into "I loved them before you did!!!!!" type whinging. Seriously.

I prefer the albums to the live stuff I've heard.

i like the cleanness of this album - it's really starting to get its teeth into me now. i find it ironic that it's linked to a genre called shoegaze, because to me this album is the aural equivalent of looking straight up at the sky just so you can feel the wind blow harder into your face. or, like, a wind machine. it's amazingly propulsive in comparison to alpinisms.

Ah, Lex, some day I will school you on Shoegaze (and the irony of the name) but today is not that day.

First generation shoegazers were never looking at their actual shoes - they were always looking at their effects to figure out which etherealiser to trigger next. It's always been an ironic name for a particularly starry-eyed genre.

Bt then again, shoegaze was always the uncomfortable marriage of two genres and two strains of musical thinking. But at least half of it was descended straight from the bits of Cocteau Twins that sounded like spinning around as fast as you could, fingers outstretched, until you fell down laughing and dizzy.

But then you take that aesthetic and you merge it with the low-down and dirty slouching miserablism of the Jesus and Mary Chain, who were decided gazers at alternately their navels and the floor (and I say this deeply loving them).

So it is an odd name for this genre, but it does capture that idea of being caught between the gutter and the stars.

When I started a shoegazing club at my university (the main purpose being so I could reserve function rooms to eat lunch in), the admin assistants that dealt with student groups all thought it was a foot fetish club and treated me warily because I was clearly a perverted weirdo.