Alpinisms

There is a moment about one minute into 'Kalaja Mari', the fifth track on this, the debut LP from School of Seven Bells (a trio of refugees from Secret Machines and On!Air!Library!), where Alejandra Dehueza asks in ponderous whisper: “Do you feel the pain?” Shorn of any accompaniment and delivered in what feels like intimate proximity, it aims clearly for a moment of profound personal engagement, but is instead, perhaps tragically, a moment of complete hilarity. Set amidst a forty-plus minute collage of inoffensive afrobeat, psychedelic guitar and ticking krautrock rhythm, it is the only moment capable of quickening the pulse, of provoking a response, and it only succeeds in doing so by crossing the line separating the hilariously banal from the merely mundane.

Alpinisms's great paradox lies in its ability to hold suspended in coherent melody a significant number of individually commendable aural features and yet succeed in leaving no trace upon the listener. A review elsewhere, largely positive, referred to the lyrics as 'modernist', aiming, one assumes, at the lyrical preoccupation with the intersubjective, but, in doing so, touched upon the crux of Alpinisms' great conceptual weakness. Like the 'failed' art of Modernist yore, School of Seven Bells have, in the process of relentlessly crafting the perfect medium, bled the work dry of everything conceived of as worth expressing in the first place. Pristine soundscapes are sullied by lyrics so noncommittal as to signify nothing at all, or so trite (see above) as to willfully empty themselves of meaning. Musically, it refuses to suddenly tip the scales or unsettle the listener, but, in having chosen that path, fails also to paint something sufficiently beautiful to hold the listener's gaze.

That it is undoubtedly worthy of being conceived of and critiqued upon the issue of its sincerity and the more abstract qualities of form should be seen as counting strongly in its favour, but it is unlikely that School of Seven Bells will see it that way, aspiring, as one must assume they do, to something more than background music at a hipster cocktail party somewhere.