The millennium so far has been twelve years of nothing, right?

Genres and trends no longer rooted in localised, socially effected crisis - rather we have a year of chillwave, a couple of months of rapegaze and ultimately just smoke without fire; largely arbitrary, purely aesthetic ‘movements’ on a global scale that hold no essential core.

Kanye West might be lauded for his Twisted Dark Fantasy because he was able to produce a record of pure artifice - it was and is the apex of the past decade's popular cultural efforts because it is artifice built upon artifice, an object put together solely by references to figures of no inherent worth, only drawn from bygone eras. This is popular culture for the moment, and School of Seven Bells are working wholly within its framework.

Their Ghostory, released earlier this year, recalls 2003: Metric, !!!, The Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs; the double-time hi-hat of the Post-Punk revival. It is wholly emblematic of a band lacking any meat, any reason to make music in the current moment; emblematic of a decade in which the revivals are being regurgitated and repackaged in the hope of further deferring the realisation that nothing new has yet arrived.

‘Show Me Love,’ ‘Love Play’ and the ambient haze of ‘Reappear’ offer an eager audience the sort of subdued shoegaze that School excelled in; the record’s sound sticks to its staple elements: a drum machine and an effervescent female voice frail against swathes of synthesizers.

While acts like The Hundred in the Hands have also returned to 2003 New York and have succeeded in a re-assessment of that drum pattern, this music is competent - tepid and flaccid and uninteresting.