School Disco
“Repetition isn't a bad thing. It can be really interesting and really fun."
Three-and-a-half minutes into 'Happen' the second track on School Disco's fourth album, 'SDIV', something happens that sums the Brighton quartet up perfectly. After flitting from a passage that sounds like supper-club jazz drifting up from the basement to a monstrous, early King Crimson-style riff, things take a turn towards doom. Just as quickly, the music speeds up. Suddenly it's like Black Sabbath's 'Fairies Wear Boots', but with Carlos Santana soloing over the top. The music, it seems, could go anywhere.
'SDIV' is (you guessed it) School Disco's fourth album, and finds the Brighton-based quartet completely comfortable with those twists and turns, a decade on from their self-released debut EP ('Mongolian Disco Show').
"I didn't really know what I was doing or what we were doing," says School Disco vocalist, songwriter and guitarist Rory Lethbridge, looking back. "[Today] the band is more realised as a creative project. We're throwing things at the wall a little less, and the DIY-ness has shed itself a little bit, but it's still there at its core. We've just had more life experience and music experience."
The result is structured but experimental, referencing Can, Osees, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, and unafraid to lean into those influences directly if the circumstances require it. 'Messiah Of Evil' starts off sounding like Spiritualized on the slow path to interstellar ecstasy, but gets there via a quick jump to Hawkind-style space rock, complete with burbling, spectral synths.
The intelligent pop of the Beach Boys and Steely Dan also gets a look-in, and the album sounds both like the sum of its very sophisticated parts as well as a launchpad for journeys into the unknown.
"The songs are a vehicle for jamming and playing together," says Rory. The emphasis is really being a band that plays together, rather than playing this song. "If you stand in the same place every night and you've got the same equipment, it can become quite limiting. I just found that jamming is such a great vehicle for exploration. And exploration is what makes things better.
"We love building those heavy bits up, as heavy as we can, and then bringing them back down, and then building them up again," he continues. "I really enjoy the repetition that you get. And how, if you stay on one note for four or five or 20 minutes, you can make that interesting for yourself or the audience. Repetition isn't a bad thing. It can be really interesting and really fun."
Clearly, this isn't the kind of thing that's going to set the Top 40 alight any time soon. But there's real opportunity in that: push commercial concerns to one side, and the space left behind can be liberating and filled with opportunity.
"I actually work in music, and I spend a lot of time looking at budgets and seeing how impossible more and more of this is becoming," Rory says. "I find that totally freeing. We're lucky we get to do this."
- Fraser Lewry
PROG FILE
LINE-UP: Rory Lethbridge (guitars, vocals, synthesisers), Harry Hayes (drums, vocals), Eliott Stanford (guitars, vocals, keyboards), Laurence Underwood (bass, vocals)
SOUNDS LIKE: Psychedelic experimental prog with occasional heaviness and the chance of a jam
CURRENT RELEASE: 'SDIV is out now via Krautpop
WEBSITE” schooldisco.bandcamp.com