School Of Seven Bells - Alpinisms

Rating:

* * * *

School Of Seven Bells is an offshoot group that could very well have far more potential than the original bands.

Twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza used to be in little-known New York post-rock band On-Air Library! while Benjamin Curtis was guitarist in Texan band Secret Machines - the sonic space rockers who sadly failed to live up to the promise they showed on their first album,

Now Here Is Nowhere

, from 2004.

Curtis left Secret Machines in 2007 to focus on SOSB;

Alpinisms

goes some way to realising the impact his old band could have had since that startling debut.

SOSB have an overwhelming pop sensitivity coupled with a more wild and menacing set of influences. There's the woozy, noisy bits akin to My Bloody Valentine, , the wistful moods of the Cocteau Twins, moments of all-consuming paranoid shoe-gazing, and the swaggering pop of something like Blonde. They're found wanting on the dreary wash of forlorness on the aptly titled

Half Asleep

. Then again, all is forgiven when the agitating Eastern mysticism of

Wired For Light

, or the 11-minute experimental audio research of

Sempiternal/Amaranth

crackle into life, and they sound unique and lethal.

Scott Kara