School Of Seven Bells

• Genre: Dream Pop
• Hometown: Brooklyn
• School Of Seven Bells Website

About

Fuzzed-out, rhythmically expansive and possessing heavenly harmonies, the Brooklyn trio School of Seven Bells creates a vaguely psychedelic, partly electronic pop as trippy and gratifying as a good night of dreaming. It's also worth waking up for. Begun as a side note in '04 by Benjamin Curtis (then of Secret Machines) and the sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (then of On! Air! Library!), the project soon blossomed into a priority (they all quit their previous bands). An '07 single for the experimental label Table of the Elements (featuring a lo-fi tribal dance version of "Face to Face on High Places") was followed by early support (in the form of remixes) from kindred spirits Prefuse 73's Scott Herren and Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie; such touchstones perfectly encapsulate the width of group's sound. Their '08 debut album, Alpinisms, has tweaked these reference points into a Technicolor studio vision -- higher fidelity, shoegazer guitars set on stun, a global palette of tonalities, a mixture of live and programmed beats -- without ever losing the band's seemingly inherent sense of tunefulness. The School can sound like Animal Collective lullabies, updated Sinead O'Connor epics or Peter Gabriel's pan-global surges: always hummable, rarely humble.

- Piotr Orlov