It’s summertime, and the good people of America demand their relaxation music, their road-trip music, their so-sunny-your-eyes-fry, feel-good music. With their sophomore effort Disconnect from Desire, the joyful trio School of Seven Bells clearly intend to satisfy those seasonal needs with pseudo-’80s guitar and synth numbers so light they’re practically airborne. Sadly, Disconnect pitches the group into a structural and creative nosedive faster than you can say ‘Amelia Earhart was never found again’.

If nothing else, the album starts off promising. “Windstorm” is an infectious opener, with the kind of hook you’d want playing in a montage of a day spent waltzing through shopping malls and carnivals — until it’s repeated again and again with no additional depth, no refinement. This killer flaw can be found anywhere you glance in Disconnect, with whole tracks beginning to sound disturbingly alike. But wait — it gets worse! The lax song construction is made all the more apparent by a lack of variety in expression beyond ‘airy’ by singer Alejandra Deheza, not to mention her awkward-to-confoundingly obtuse lyrical technique (most likely the result of creating songs by starting with her lucid-dream-inspired lyrics — good idea, bad execution). Take into account the stale drum machine usage here and, voila, we have a recipe for being let down.

That Disconnect from Desire becomes less of a title and more a prophecy is a damn shame, a Hindenberg if there ever were one for the still-maturing indie-pop scene here in the US. It could have been a hell of a ride, but with only bursts of the aural potential and harmonic beauty demonstrated by Seven Bells’ other work, it instead brings to mind that tinny radio broadcaster’s voice shouting over the image of melting metal wreckage and dreams dispersed in a puff of ignited hydrogen. Oh, the humanity, indeed.

[2/5]

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