"Disconnect from desire" is the sort of message usually encoded within salt-of-the-earth folk or new age unicorn fantasies, so it was easy to view School of Seven Bells' second album with suspicion. After all, its immaculate textures and brisk, glossy electro-pop are the kind you hear in moderately high-end clothing stores or spinning classes-- places where people reconnect with their need for quick fixes. But SVIIB's career to date has been a process of streamlining and economization: since their 2008 debut, Alpinisms, they've continuously pared down song length, sonic clutter, as well as personnel, and now on Ghostory, Alejandra Deheza and Ben Curtis come across like they've achieved a Zen sort of perfection as a duo. Whereas the sound they courted on Alpinisms intended to recreate the overwhelming physical bliss of shoegaze, Ghostory takes after a fundamental meditative tranquility, where thoughts and emotions are acknowledged as they pass through the calm without being judged as intrinsically good or bad.
Though Ghostory claims a conceptual framework involving a "young girl named Lafaye and the ghosts that surround her life," plainspoken song titles like "Love Play" and "Show Me Love" give you a fairly accurate survey of what to expect topically. And perhaps the departure of Deheza's sister Claudia from the fold resulted in SVIIB jettisoning the insular mysticism of old for intelligible emoting-- "The light of day gives me no relief/Because I see you in everything," "You take my love and leave me empty/ And all you feel is a fist of draining sand." Those are the first lines on the first two songs, and Ghostory ultimately invests in the strange tension they achieve by Deheza's frictionless vocals.
Though unerringly composed, Deheza doesn't sing with the brassy confidence of a pop star, but rather the steadiness of a surgeon-- "this happened, here's how I feel," and melodies move straight and orderly, dots continuously connected. It uses the unease of romantic disturbance as some kind of baseline, breakups far enough in the past to allow perspective, but new loves never too new (oddly enough, this is the sort of mundane restlessness that triggers consumer culture). By Ghostory's end, Deheza coos, "you kindle me, babe," but note she's not ablaze or smoldering. In short, recast most of Ghostory with acoustic guitars and suck out the aggressive beats and you might have something similar to an Imogen Heap or Dido record that might otherwise be off your radar until they get sampled by your favorite cloud rap producer. Or those "comedown" ballads that got stuck on Chemical Brothers albums with BPMs closer to their surroundings. Or, perhaps the club remixes of similarly prosaic love songs like Coldplay's "Clocks" or Sarah McLachlan's "Sweet Surrender." If you can't concede the awesomeness of those, then we're not gonna get very far here.
If you can, Ghostory is at its best a very pleasurable realization of niche. "The Night" hurtles towards a chorus of Deheza repeating, "devour me," with an inappositely chipper tone as 32nd-note hi-hats surround her like piranhas, while "Love Play" contrasts vocal shimmer with busily heaving bottom-end in case you've forgotten Curtis' former gig Secret Machines had one of the most righteously loud rhythm sections going. While those are distillation, "Lafaye" shows compositional advancement, initially sounding like wheelhouse SVIIB with its geysers of processed guitar distortion before a vowel-driven hook gets subtly recast in three ways-- at first in a striking but standard minor key, then as a major-key pivot and a more tonally ambivalent final chorus that releases its pent momentum. It's when they curb the momentum that Ghostory reveals its limitations: Without any percussive underpinning, "Reappear" and "Show Me Love" can't succeed in developing atmosphere, simply because you can't have atmosphere in an airlock. The overwhelming textural sterility brings to mind Curtis and Deheza's recording in the clinical white studio gracing the cover of the first Secret Machines record.
Since Ghostory as a whole tries to present SVIIB as a scientific process, it's fitting that its last two tracks come off like a final synthesis. "White Wind" is SVIIB as a platonic ideal, Deheza achieving robotic actualization (indeed, the melodies are similar to that of a digital touch-tone) as Curtis and drummer Christopher Colley go nuts with percussive studio tricks. All of which sets the band up for an ultimate date with destiny. While the breakbeat and honking synth riff of "Bye Bye Bye" inspired Amy Granzin to allude to the impact My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" had on Disconnect From Desire, I think she jumped the gun since Ghostory's eight-minute closer "When You Sing" is quite possibly the most blatant "Soon" homage in recorded history. Still, there's something actually quite charming about how overt their intentions are: If you've been called an electronic act and a shoegaze act and a dance act, "Soon" is your K2, and maybe that drum loop and cycle of gelatinous guitar chords are just public domain now, no different from a band of record collectors utilizing the "Be My Baby" drum intro or vinyl crackle to evoke a certain realm of emotions.
It's crucial to acknowledge this crack in the veneer, since it's tough to think of SVIIB as being nerds of any type, having crushes on music or people. I suppose we should just come to an agreement that a record that doesn't explicitly tell you how to feel isn't necessarily doing something wrong, and make no mistake, SVIIB clearly know what they're after on Ghostory. Maybe too much so, since the combination of protracted sterility and innate desire typically manifest in things like an oppressively planned Valentine's Day or one of those inner-peace retreats that cost a shitload of money. Those are the pretty, mixed messages that Ghostory sends.
