albums and tracks

This debut album from School Of Seven Bells is a consistently intriguing but never wilfully esoteric work.

A member of the Brooklyn-based trio, Benjamin Curtis, used to be in Dallas spacerock faves Secret Machines, but even this can't explain Alpinisms' strength.

Take the typically beautiful co-vocal of twin sisters Claudia and Alejandra Deheza on 'Half Asleep'. A bed of noisy, corrosive My Bloody Valentine-style guitars revs away, but it's the voices that garner attention, evoking that first day of spring after a long, depressing winter.

'Iamundernodisguise' combines the icy solemnity of The Knife with chanting you'd expect to hear in an Amazonian rainforest. 'Face To Face On High Places', meanwhile, mixes El Guincho polyrhythms with mood music you'd expect to find in Werner Herzog's jungle insanity epic Fitzcarraldo.

To be fair to the Dehezas, they could sing the credits from an episode of Dog Borstal and it would sound exquisite, but the words they emit here always soothe, like the simple but effective refrain during 'For Kalaja Mari': "There is no need to get depressed/There is no need for anxiousness".

Alpinisms references but never plagiarises many great acts that have worked on the fringes and in the centre of pop, from Kate Bush to Fleet Foxes via Animal Collective.

More than this, it's an uplifting, challenging, multi-faceted work of beauty and intensity that belongs in the record collection of any discerning contemporary music fan.

Lou Thomas