School Of Seven Bells and Bat For Lashes @ Shepherds Bush Empire 19/4/09

Fashion and music are fickle bedfellows – at the best of times mutually affirming; at others making fools of those whose musical substance fails to match their stylistic pretensions.

School Of Seven Bells are fairly recent navigators of the volatilities of musical whimsy. Williamsburg origins and quasi-supernatural themes, not to mention the visually striking nature of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, have rendered them a genuinely intriguing trio and won them much critical and cultural praise with the recent release of debut LP Alpinisms.

Their recorded sound, self-professed “music to dance to”, enchants with left-field pop propulsions – but tonight this is somewhat lost in translation. The diminutive twins, surrounded by the stage-clutter of Bat For Lashes ephemera, are missing their usual radiating glow. And while the venue is packed, those in attendance observe passively, mustering appreciative nods and polite applause to the familiar looping refrains of ‘My Cabal’ and ‘iamundernodisguise’. It is an incredibly difficult gig to support due to the singular allurement of Khan’s iconic persona, and the inanimate ‘weird-folk’ advocates of her audience. While School Of Seven Bells demonstrate their usual aptitude for markedly inventive mystical pop, it seems lost, even wasted, on the crowd present.

The icon in question, Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, has long been the darling of the higher echelons of credible fashion magazines – as evidenced by recent shoots for Spin, Dazed & Confused and Fact magazine where she features as the paragon of smouldering musical vogue. Her music, however, has always sounded faintly derivative, conjouring mysterious etherealities from eighties synths, tribal percussion and neo-folk inflections, rendering Khan the hotpotch progeny of Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks and Bjork.

It is these preconceptions of nostalgia that make her performance tonight even more astounding – Khan is an artist who must be seen to be believed, her live shows hypnotically captivating. That same audience passivity that School Of Seven Bells struggled seems to annoy Khan equally: she tries to encourage dancing in more upbeat numbers, but everyone’s just staring, visually enthralled by her presence. Her tiny, leaping form is encased in a pink-silk jumpsuit and clown-ruff, her aura is as big as a stadium and her voice unexpectedly magnificent, reaching through octaves with furious power and soulful wispiness in equal measure.

Instrumentally, the diverse talents of Khan’s three-piece band transform esoteric pop-songs into panopticons of sound with a plethora of equipment, from keys and electronic drum kits to bells and an autoharp. In a set that spans an hour and a half and includes two encores, Bat For Lashes leave no doubt that Khan is one effigy of the fashion world wholly substantiated by her musical origins.

School Of Seven Bells Interview

For a front-woman of a scene Brooklyn band, Alejandra Deheza is unusually smiley on stage. The diminutive, raven-haired twin of fellow vocalist Claudia, Alejandra and her grin are almost completely hidden behind a thick black fringe as she executes gilded, frosted dream-pop that could melt an ice-sheet. It’s partly the angular, word-centric phrasing and crystal-clear harmonies of SVIIB that has seen their steady ascension to the realms of one of the must-see-must-hear bands this year. The other half is down to the band themselves – the combination of the beautiful and fascinating twin sisters, and the reputation of Ben Curtis, formerly of American alterna-rock trio Secret Machines. Ben’s reputation is a weighty one, too – when he left Secret Machines in 2007 he even received hate mail from some of the band’s more fanatical fanbase. So has it been worth it? Gigwise spoke to Alejandra about the SVIIB story up to now.

“It couldn’t have gone better, the crowds are really charged,” Ally Dehezra tells me of the early days of their mini-UK tour. The UK dates are followed by some time in Europe, SXSW, and then support slots with Bat For Lashes, White Lies and Black Moth Super Rainbow that will take them through to summer on a relentless and gruelling tour schedule. It’s not a predicament that Ally seems particularly concerned by, though. “Before we’d even thought about recording we were being asked by bands to go on tour,” she says of their early popularity, “so we worked out a lot of music live, in rooms, by hearing ourselves go through the songs every night, and I think it came from the live performance.”

Live, they were able to make the ‘very deliberate’ decision to use a drum machine and pre-recorded electronic bass that makes their songs so effortlessly rhythmic, conveying Ally’s sense that “it’s definitely dance music. People say they like to chill out to it, but personally, I think it’s got really great beats.” The oft-repeated shoegaze tag, then, is a misleading one. “People assign you to something, and that’s totally cool, as long as it’s a genre they love I don’t mind!” Unconcerned as she may be, SVIIB make music born of a slick process so far from the heavily distorted, noise-obscured tendencies of shoegaze that to label them that is to do both the band and the genre a disservice.

Perhaps SVIIB defy categorisation precisely because they eschew it, instead absorbing influences from all directions. “Deheza is a Basque last name,” Ally explains of her heritage, “but we were born in Guatemala, my mother’s Costa Rican and my father’s Parisian, and we grew up in the states since we were 11 months old.” Musically, their backgrounds are similarly diverse, “We don’t just listen to one kind of music, and I think that comes out, but we have our things that we love, like Robert Wyatt, and jazz.”

Certainly for guitarist Ben Curtis, SVIIB marks a huge departure from his previous work with Secret Machines. It was a brave move to walk away from the security of being in a mid-level rock band with a cult underground following, but ultimately, it has paid off. There is something very ‘new’ sounding about SVIIB, and Ally doesn’t speak out of turn when she says “I feel like this record has a really long life, and that people will keep on discovering it: it won’t get old.”

As you’d imagine of a band at the forefront of modernistic pop, SVIIB hail from Brooklyn, today’s creative capital of the states. Back home, they move in artistic circles with the likes of Blonde Redhead, which partly explains why they bagged a recent support slot on the Blonde Redhead tour – something that Ally draws out as a highlight of the past two years. “They’re really great,” she says of the fellow-twin-featuring band, “they really took care of us on the road. Amedeo changed our tail-light when it ran out and Kazu made us this really incredible curry one night, she fed us in the tour bus.” Blonde Redhead is also remixing some of their album, alongside Justin Broadrick from Jesu and Mark Clifford remix.

With debut ‘Alpinisms’ released only last month this side of the pond, it comes as some surprise that School Of Seven Bells are already eager to set to work on a new record. “We want to start recording again in the summer,” Ally says. For the time being though, as they sell out shows in the UK and the US and continually beguile with an angular dream-pop that is all their own, Ally is one cheerful front-woman with a lot to be smiling about.

School Of Seven Bells + Kyte + Apache Beat @ Cargo 26/2/09

Yet another band to emerge from Brooklyn’s crowded scene (is there anyone left there not wielding musical aspirations of global proportions?), Apache Beat combine intense, angular post-rock with the razor-sharp vocals of Christina Aceto. At least, they do on record. Tonight in Cargo Apache Beat don’t quite manage to hold their own on a storming line-up that leaves them slightly awash in their own noisy, pompous pop. There’s just too much going on as dreamy synths pull strong guitar riffs apart at the seams, while percussion rains down, powerless to anchor such disparate musical elements. Aceto should dominate on vocal-led songs such as ‘Knives’, but she lacks charisma tonight, at one point meekly dropping the mic at the end of a track in what is obviously intended as a gesture of rock ‘n’ roll recklessness, but ends up looking like a sort of resigned defeatism.


Kyte fare better, but still lack the hypnotic, gilded polish and sonic confidence that they mastered on last year’s eponymous mini-album. This handsome Leicestershire quartet sculpts mesmerising soundscapes, combining dreamy Scandinavian pop and Postal Service’s glitchy electronic clarity. There is some discrepancy between Nick Moon’s recorded vox-vocals, which breathe effortlessly through shimmering synths and icy keyboards, and his live performance, which comes over brasher and more affected as he repeatedly sweeps his hands through his hair, cowering over keys. But this is perhaps to be expected from an act that requires a large amount of pre-recording to render their music live, and their set still holds up in the dark, cavernous venue. It’s the perfect setting for the ecclesiastical beauty of ‘Boundaries’ and the yellow-hued glimmer of the aptly named ‘Sunlight’. As the only UK-based band on the bill, they do our solitary isle proud.

Numbers swell remarkably in Cargo’s dingy underbelly ready for School Of Seven Bells. New York’s darling band of the hour have gone from relative unknowns to one of the most sought-after acts of the year so far with their stunning debut ‘Alpinisms’, and the turn-out reflects this remarkable ascendancy to the dizzy-heights of the trend-setter. Part of the reason for their new-found popularity is their ability to combine modernistic pop sensibilities with infectious, tribal beats. But they also employ a powerful mystique due to the magnetic beauty of twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza and a propensity for abstraction that would come across as pretentious were it not for the fact that they have the musical grounding to merit a bit of ostentation (they list ‘the dialogue with heaven, earth and death’ as their influences on myspace, for example).

On stage Alejandra stands spotlighted in front, grinning like a stage-school protégé as she executes pitch-perfect vocal harmonies with help from sister Claudia. Meanwhile ex-Secret Machines guitarist Benjaman Curtis broods in the back, his face obscured for most of the set. Single ‘iamundernodisguise’, which has received considerable radio airplay in recent weeks, appears early on. Towards the end the tracks become brighter and build in intensity. ‘Half Asleep’ is particularly well-received, revealing some well-versed fans in the cramped audience, where as ‘Chain’ chugs, its syncopated vocals rooted above sliding electronic effects.

School Of Seven Bells radiate with confidence in both sound and style, making them worthy inheritors of hype that would have swamped lesser acts. The trio embark on an almost impossibly hectic touring schedule right through to summer, a season that will surely cement them as one of New York’s most exciting musical exports in 2009.

Electrocrap: In Defence Of Indie

Does anyone else out there think that Lady Gaga’s video bears a striking resemblance to the Use A Condom Adverts gracing our TVs at the moment? You know, the everyone’s-having-fun-now-but-in-the-morning-she’ll be-pregnant-with-deformed-quintuplets-and-he’ll-have-stage-three-syphillis ones. (Incidentally, just how creepy would it be if every time you got a girl’s knickers off the voice of responsibility issued forth a whispered “gonorrhoea” from her fallulah?)

Anyway, she must be doing something right. The writhing, bewigged mannequin that is Gaga has stormed to number one this last week in what a load of people are saying is the start of the female electro-twat invasion. Sorry, I mean electro-pop.

All the major record labels have got a girl in their clutches for this latest fad. Fiery-haired soul-singing Florence and The (money-making) Machine is in the clutches of Gaga’s own Island, while Polydor goes redhead to redhead with La Roux, and Warner will be hoping Little Boots has a fighting chance as most people’s more credible outsider.

The majors aren’t signing bands anymore, because apparently guitar bands are dead. (Perhaps this explains why the market is awash with reissues and boxsets from yesteryear, all promising ‘never-heard-before’ material in pretty packaging for a pretty package of your hard-earned cash, too?)

The truth is, the majors are wrong, and have been about most things for some time now, which is why they’re in so much trouble. In fact ‘indie’ music (read: guitar bands signed to independent labels) is alive and well – and there’s plenty of ribcage rattling evidence to the contrary in some of 2009’s biggest and best indie hopefuls. Here’s who to look out for:

Prog-pop pschedelia was reinvented for the kids by Brooklyn’s finest, MGMT, last year. There are going to be plenty of people riding this colourful wave in their wake in the next twelve months. The (major-signed) Amazing Baby will be filling more than a few column inches, but there’s better to be had with Cambridge’s (the other Cambridge’s) Passion Pit (right), who concoct dreamy electronica of marginally psycheledic influence, that still feels somehow born of MGMT. And if that isn’t psychedelic enough for you, Perth’s Tame Impala will knock you out with their lysergic guitar riffs and intoxicating vocals. This attractive three-piece have got an album in the pipeline this year, which, if last year’s EP is anything to go off, will be just about as good as it gets.

The other big thing last year was wonky toytronica in the vein of Metronomy and Late Of The Pier – if you liked it, refer yourselves immediately to We Have Band and the slightly less sonically nonchalant Cats In Paris. Ragged indie rock is still about and sounding pretty spectacular in the form of Tigers That Talked and gig-circuit veterans Bombay Bicycle Club – you might think the latter have been going at it for an indie-epoque, but it’s only know that we’re finally sniffing an album release (smells good).

If you like your indie thick with nu-age modernism, School Of Seven Bells (left) make silken, looped psych-pop with laptops and twins. No, really. Meanwhile, Dinosaur Pile Up is the best grunge-revivalist act to hit the airwaves since the real thing, and Ten Kens are a must-listen, much blogged four-piece of staggering inventiveness and guile whose music grins from the darkest corners of American alt-rock.

And, though they don’t fit anywhere, if you liked the whole Marling nu-folk thing last year, for goodness sake listen to some of her contemporaries to hear some of the most humble, sincere and organic sounding stuff out there – this scene really is the antidote to Gaga and her gaggle. Mumford & Sons especially are ones to watch as they work towards an album release in 2009.


Apologies for the way in which the last few paragraphs are organised like I just vomited band names onto a page – but this is absolutely a reflection of the prolific, diverse and downright fantastic stuff about (most of it indie). Gaga and the viral popularity of outspoken, synthetic and stylised marionettes might dominate airwaves and column inches thanks to the gawp-and-swallow lowest-common-denominator consumer. But don’t let any brainwashed major marketing man convince you that indie is dead – one listen to any of the above will convince very much to the contrary.