School Of Seven Bells pay tribute to MBV in Whelans.

There’s a song on ‘Alpinisms’ – the debut album of School Of Seven Bells, a nu-gaze band from New York made up of Benjamin Curtis, formerly of Secret Machines and identical twins Claudia and Alejandra Dehez - that is the best homage to the way out sound of My Bloody Valentine since, well My Bloody Valentine. It’s called ‘Face to face on high places’ and it’s very, very good. You don’t listen to it and decry the band for being such copyists. You applaud them for coming up with such a good song that just happens to sounds like an outtake from ‘Loveless’. It’s one of the reasons I went along to see them in Whelans last Monday. Could they replicate the woozy, lazy, shoegazy sound of ‘Alpinisms’ in a live setting? Well, yes actually.

They still look a little unsure of themselves on stage. The beautiful Dehez sisters’ eyes dart around the room alittle self-consciously  : one on keyboards, the other on vocals and guitar. In between is Curtis, eyes down, lost in the music, his previous role in Secret Machines a dimming memory. Behind them there is no drummer which is little disconcerting. And no bass-player. Yet they still manage to propel a rich, full sound however, a sound atop which the twins’ voices sing intertwined, seamless and crystal clear. They play  that song. It sounds great. As does ‘Half Asleep’ which contains the line ‘One day, suddenly, time took a turn that once felt so brief/I blinked to see polite ghosts fading quickly’. Worthy of Auden or Kavanagh is that.  It’s a short set, we forgive them: the tickets were cheap and they have only one album out. They disappear to return to ‘their house party in Swords’.

There is a fine line between homage and unashamed replication. It’s a line most bands don’t see or care about. School Of Seven Bells know where the line is. They take their MBV blueprint and distill something fresh out of it while still sounding like MBV.  They’ve nailed it. They’re good.

‘Half Asleep’

 

The First Great Album Of 2009 : ‘Fever Ray’

It’s only February but the best album of 2009 may have already arrived. In fact, ‘Fever Ray’, the new solo project from Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of singular Swedish act The Knife, is not released in physical format until March 23^rd but it’s been available to download from iTunes since January.

Fans of The Knife will know what to expect here as it’s full of that murky, eerily distinctive electro-pop we are used to but ‘Fever Ray’ is a little more immediate and accessible than her work with The Knife.Opening with the spooky ‘If I had a heart’ the quality never dips until the final note of the final track. In between we get the perverse pop of ‘When I Grow Up’,  the drowsy confessional of ‘Concrete Walls’ and the solitary beats of ‘Leave the streets empty for me’.  If this is a new Knife album in all but name, then it is the best Knife album yet.

If The Knife was all about the beats and glitches and conjuring up imagery to send a shiver down your spine, the songs here are more personal, less fantastical and a little less self-consciously ‘weird’. Don’t get me wrong, they are a unique and brilliant band but being freed from the creative constraints of collaborating with her brother Olof as part of The Knife seems to have provided a surfeit of new ideas for her, all of which can be heard on Fever Ray. It’s an album that yields something new with each listen, that leaves you a little dazed at the sheer ingenuity on display. It is a dark masterpiece.

 

.

 

Charles Wesley Cooper 1977-2009

January 2009 was a busy month for the Grim Reaper. He took The Cramps’ Lux Interior, who has done a pretty good impersonation of the ol’ Reaper himself throughout the last few decades, and also put poor old John Martyn out of his misery. One piece of unwelcome news that unsettled me the most,  however, was the untimely death of Charles Wesley Cooper (above, right), one half of the relatively unknown American electronica act Telefon Tel Aviv. Although it has not been fully confirmed, it is thought Cooper took his own life after an argument with his girlfriend.  

I became aware of Telefon after hearing the wistful, electro-ambience of ‘Sound In A Dark Room’ on Donal Dineen’s late night Today FM show and have been a major fan ever since, especially of their astute remixes of the likes of Apparat and Barbara Morgenstern where they would often improve on the original. After a gap of four or five years since their excellent last album ‘Map Of What Is Effortless’  they released  ‘Immolate Yourself’ – a collection of songs that had all the hallmarks of being their breakthrough album – in January of this year and live dates were in the pipeline.  It looks likely that I will not now see them live as Cooper’s creative partner in the band, Joshua Eustis, is too distraught to carry on at this moment in time. Cooper’s death didn’t make the newsdesk of NME.com or even Pitchfork but for the few of  us who have been touched by the innovative yet poignant electronic music he and Eustis created over the last decade, it is indeed an extremely sad passing. RIP.