School of Seven Bells’ debut album Alpinisms is a master class in emotive, cerebral electro-pop

By April Hayes
Published: October 28th, 2008 | 1:30pm

Late one night, while Alejandra Deheza was watching a PBS show on shoplifting rings, a band was born in her mind. What caught her attention was the name School of Seven Bells, a clandestine 1980s South American pick pocketing school that “may or may not have existed.” “When I heard ‘Seven Bells,’ I just thought: seven facets of one personality, seven ways of writing — all the ideas started flowing in my head of songs being letters from one character to another. It just all came together,” Alejandra said.

An indie super group of sorts, Deheza’s idea took off when she and twin sister Claudia — both singing in ambient, electro-pop outfit On! Air! Library! at that time — were touring with Secret Machines, a sibling act in its own right, featuring Texan brothers Brandon and Benjamin Curtis. When the Deheza sisters’ group disbanded, Benjamin jumped ship from Secret Machines, and the Brooklyn trio, School of Seven Bells was born. Their debut Alpinisms (Ghostly International) will be released October 28, 2008, and follows the band’s tours with Interpol and Blonde Redhead, as well as a string of singles, remixes, and 7-inch releases that have set the blogs buzzing. Yet all this Partridge Family-cheeriness hides the reservations most would have forming a band with one’s sibling.

The road to rocknroll infamy (or obscurity) is littered with the roadkill of many a sibling act gone awry — Curtis, himself, having reportedly experienced the perils of working with family — yet Alejandra insisted that their experiences in previous groups have made them a cohesive unit. “Starting out with a concept with three people of one mind makes a huge, huge difference,” she said. “In On! Air! Library! we all started out with different ideas about what the music should be. With this one, it started out like a very united front.”

The big happy family vibe extends to their living arrangements, as the band shares an apartment in Brooklyn, which makes for a 24/7 breeding ground of new material. “We all live together, and we’re always working on something. You can’t be in the living room working on a song without someone in the kitchen hearing it,” she said.

Perhaps this is part of what creates the intimacy in songs like “Half Asleep” or “Wired for Light.” Each densely layered track on the album invokes a sonic world unto itself. Ethereal, soaring vocals reach ever upward as swirling, droning guitar rumblings pull them back down to earth — all driven by pulsing, often danceable beats. Claudia and Alejandra’s stunning vocals feed off of each other then pull apart, and the twins often sing in disconcerting unison, one voice indistinguishable from the other.

Alejandra describes this record as made up of “mountain climbing songs,” and named the album after reading the surrealist 1952 Rene Daumal novel Mount Analogue, also a major inspiration for psychedelic, midnight-movie classic The Holy Mountain. In the book, Daumal writes that “Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again .... So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above.”

“When we were wrapping things up, that’s just something that came to my mind, that these songs were alpinisms,” Alejandra explains.

With such heady concepts and cryptic song titles like “My Cabal” and “Connjur,” things could get too cerebral. Luckily, the Seven Bells know how to move a crowd, bringing insanely hooky rhythms to their otherworldly jams. The strength and saving grace of the music lies in uniting these extremes and playing off of their tension; grounding the conceptual and sending darker ideas skyward with lilting vocals and pop beats. Alpinisms brings to mind a Misery Is a Butterfly-era Blonde Redhead crossed with a little Sonic Youth Daydream Nation.

True to their idea-a-minute form, not only are they already at work on the next Seven Bells record, but they are working on a musical side project that has its own literary-influenced name and back story. Night of the Gifts — a title derived from a Jorge Borges story and the project’s name — is “the dream world of the Seven Bells,” says Claudia. The sound is textural, imagistic, and layered vocal arrangements that Benjamin described as “the dark antithesis” to the School of Seven Bells’ project.

Clearly School of Seven Bells has the indie cred and technical chops to turn out unique, awe-inspiring landscapes of sound. But the truly intriguing element is the meeting of the minds of its three principals and seeing what their mixed bag of influences and inspirations will conjure up next.

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School of Seven Bells MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/schoolofsevenbells

Night of the Gifts MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/nightofthegifts

School of Seven Bells iTunes