School of Seven Bells - Alpinism (2008)

Alpinism starts off with Iamundernodisguise, which sets the tone of the record - a slightly psychedelic, noise tinged, beat heavy shoegaze/electronica album. There is a very subtle background synthesizer sound running throughout the song that reminds me off the aged, warped sound of Boards of Canada. Face to Face is a poppier song, without the noise influences of the opener, but think My Bloody Valentine with more prominent drums and vocals on top that you can clearly make out. Wired For Light starts off with some interesting horn sounds over a prominent dance beat, and singer Alejandra Deheza sings an interesting syncopated vocal track over some spacey synthesizers, taking this song in more of an electronica dance song direction (though still with a reverb heavy layered guitar sound still present), and ends with some interesting South American sounding ethnic drums. Moving ahead a bit, Connjur starts off leading the listener to expect a dark song a la Aphex Twin for the first few seconds, until the vocal tracks kick in. A nice lead guitar part with echo trades off with vocals through the song, and their is a nice heavy distortion spacey background wall of sound and a consistent buzzing low bass as Deheza soars above it all. Alpinism proves that School of Seven Bells has cemented it's own spot in late 2000 indie music as a marvelous indie/shoegaze/electronica band.

As this is the first review that I'm posting, I'd like to inform any readers of the format the postings will take: I'm going to post every day, with one new album review. I'll also do one older album review every few days (or more possibly), and other posts whenever I deem something worthy of talking about in the world of music. Every Tuesday, I'll include my personal pick for the best album of the last week. On the first Tuesday of each month, I will also include top 5 or 10 albums of the past month from amongst those (or something else if I miss it, but all of these will be reviewed on here by me). By the way - I'm doing this solely for fun, so don't expect to see many bad reviews on here. All of these albums will be my favorites from the weeks releases or favorite older albums.