The following article was submitted by Matthew Mayz:

Windstorm – School of Seven Bells Windstorm – School of Seven Bells (Buy)

It’s easy to get lost in a dream. As your eyes close, occasionally you find yourself frolicking through a field of happiness as the world around you just brims with beauty. Everything is perfect. Everything is sublime. Yet you soon wake up, because even in your dreams, you know this world isn’t real. There is no depth and no emotion. The end result: you wake up happy, but frustrated. Thus I present School of Seven Bells‘ sophomore album, Disconnect From Desire.

It’s more than difficult to not listen to this album in its entirety without putting on a smile and slowly closing your eyes to the band’s lush atmospheric sounds. Everything about the band’s music is produced to perfection. No instrumental or vocal performance outshines any other in the band, so not only do they sound tight, but cohesive as a whole. However, with 80’s sounding synths, numerous vocoder layers, and enough effects to make Iggy Pop sound angelic, closing your eyes to this album may result in you dozing off.

The main issue seems to be the lack of passion or feeling found through both the band’s lyrics and sound. Although the sound may become hypnotizing at times, this trance doesn’t stray from the fact that the rhythmic build ups and epic choir like choruses found in their debut album are basically absent. There are tracks that stand out such as Dust Devil and Windstorm, where the band’s songwriting ability shines above just becoming a wall of sound. Yet, for the rest of the album, the songs tend to blend one right into another, and one track becomes indistinguishable from the previous one.

To be fair, both time and effort had to be put into this album to make the instrumentation sound so impeccable to the ear. However, instead of establishing a musical identity with their sophomore release, School of Seven Bells has instead created an album I feel most would either do yoga to, or use to fall asleep. This album was properly named, because they seem to have disconnected from their desire to be known more than that mellow band with the identical twin singers. Here’s to you School of Seven Bells. Repeat the grade and try again.