“Ablaze,” from School of Seven Bells’ fourth and likely final LP, is composed of the same elements SVIIB have threaded together for years: heroic riffs, a colossus of a percussion track and Alejandra Deheza’s weightless sighs. The emotional clarity, however, is new; the song is an ode to redemptive love, delivered with full earnestness and complete surrender. “You saw the stars in me,” Deheza sings, and her often-glassy voice and SVIIB’s usually-huge mixes turn into something more plaintive, almost a cappella: “You told me how you saw the stars/You told me that till I believed.” It’s among the most life-affirming five minutes of pop music in recent memory. It is quite possibly perfect.
“Ablaze” is also the first song on SVIIB, making the album’s first words “how could I have known?” The subtext is unavoidable and wrenching. Deheza’s former bandmate and creative-and-more partner Benjamin Curtis died in December of 2013 from T-cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, and understandably, SVIIB took a long break; the only song they released was a cover of Joey Ramone’s “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up),” recorded from Curtis’ hospital bed. The songs that comprise SVIIB, though, had existed for a while; specifically since 2012, recorded during a couple idyllic sessions. “We were finally in this place of just perfect peace, just being best friends,” Deheza said in an interview last year. So she wrote the lyrics to SVIIB as a largely biographical memorial of their relationship, romantic and platonic, through breakups and hardships and emotional pits. Even the title, its faux-Latinized shorthand (and it being the group’s only self-titled release), now reads like the heading to a last chapter, a deliberate final statement.
School of Seven Bells have aways made tweaks and refinements from their essential sound, and SVIIB doesn’t depart from it. But where their earlier material sometimes seemed detached, or more concerned with mystic metaphors than emotional clarity, SVIIB is viscerally felt. Every track on SVIIB is one Curtis had worked on before his death, and the conceit—and the fact that Deheza followed it through to the album’s completion—lends eerie resonance to lyrics like “open your eyes, love, you’ve got me crying.”
SVIIB is undoubtedly a hard listen at times for those who have followed the group, particularly when its context breaks into the songs. “Confusion" is bleak and tremulous—the exhaustion in Deheza’s vocals is not acting—and in the right mood, completely gutting. But while it’s remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring. “A Thousand Times More” surges and reassures, the musical equivalent to a personal cheering squad; even the lover’s tiff of “On My Heart” is devoid of sour notes, collapsing into a swoon after its bridge and staying there.
Nor is the album stuck in the heady, bodiless realm. “Signals” is deadly serious and deadly dramatic, God, guns, glitches, snakes, bass choirs and congregations all making lyrical appearances, but all before a sledge of a riff in the chorus that hits as hard and sure as sudden attraction—a huge hook, right to the nerves. “Open Your Eyes,” though it retains some of the group’s typically idiosyncratic songwriting and meandering phrasing, is the most straightforward pop ballad SVIIB have recorded—Deheza’s speak-singing resembles a number of current radio hits, and change a few chords and the piano and percussion would evoke closing credits. But the song would not work any other way. SVIIB’s career, from beginning to likely end—has been a process of paring down their sound, jettisoning all extraneous material until all that’s left is emotional truth. And SVIIB is not only the group’s most technically accomplished work, their perfected swan song—it feels true. You couldn’t ask for a better memorial than that.
