Posted on 11 May 2010
Sleigh Bells long-awaited (it’s been, like, so many months) future-pop blueprint/debut LP is out today, and you can hear it. Today. Not before, because M.I.A.’s N.E.E.T. imprint kept Treats on non-leak lockdown under threat of excessive violence. We’re all in the same boat here, so feel free to log responses in the comments. A quick primer for fellow obsessive consumers of the duo’s various demos and 2HELLWU CD-R, after a very quick pass through: ”Beach Girls” is now “Kids” (Track 2); “Ring Ring” is now “Rill Rill” (and managed to hold on to that “Can You Get To That” Funkadelic sample from Maggot Brain); “Infinity Guitars,” “A/B Machines,” and “Crown On The Ground” all made the cut, as did some of those in-the-red guitars and beats. But those aren’t the only tricks for Treats — as told by “Tell ‘Em,” Derek and Alexis (and engineer Shane Stoneback) didn’t waste their access to the high-end studio: The alternately crisp and cataclysmic production’s as much a focus as the songs’ sugar and slice. This should make for a happy Tuesday.
Stream it at NPR for a week — buy it at iTunes forever more. If you want to compare to older iterations, there are still a bunch of those demos up in our BTW post. Take “Tell ‘Em” to go:
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Posted on 23 April 2010
In that recent NME interview where M.I.A. cut-down Lady Gaga, she offered enthusiastic praise to her recent N.E.E.T. signees Sleigh Bells:
The new Sleigh Bells album epitomizes how kids are feeling in America –- so much energy, but nothing to do with it. Everyone wants you to be an apathetic consumer over there, so it’s cool to have some weird discomfort going on.
You get some of that energy in this punked/fuzzed/dubbed-out new track of hers, “Born Free.” It sorta sounds like Julie Ruin covering the Slits. Covering X-Ray Spex. Or, you can just say you feel the Sleigh Bells influence. Or you could mention she wrote it with Suicide’s Alan Vega. All make sense.
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Posted on 05 November 2009
Posted on 22 October 2009
After this week, it’ll seem like Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have come out of nowhere to form the outfit on everyone’s CMJ breakout list. But there are roots, dug deep and spread far: Past members of Sleigh Bells went on to form buzz-band Surfer Blood. Derek’s old hardcore band Poison The Well toured with Give Up The Ghost, the defunct hardcore outfit of past BTW Cold Cave’s Wes Eisold. Alexis Krauss is a school teacher with a pop-singer past. All of which gives certain strength to their reinvention in this excellent new outfit.
It bears mentioning that Derek lived (and recorded most of these demos) down the hall from one of our apartments, and that his tracks were passed to us by hand some months ago — a true bedroom project. In that form the songs showed jagged promise, but after seeing them fleshed out and flooring the Hype Machine party at Santos yesterday, they’re no longer an “if” but “when.” In part because the rough edges of those demos’ combustible pop are now more finely razed, in part because of Alexis Krauss’s outsized yet totally natural stage presence.
Sleigh Bells are just a duo — Derek on beat production, guitars, and songwriting; Alexis Krauss on vocals — but their tracks ram together many sonic worlds. Their electronic beats thud with gut-rattling low end; guitars are distorted siren squalls (”A/B Machines”), or heavily gated and thoroughly crunched power chords (”Infinity Guitars”), or playful, beach bum strums (the Beta Band-y “Ring Ring”). Krauss flips easily from hip-hop hook sass (”Beach Girls”), to pop power to sunshined, coquettish coos. The demos that are floating around are all getting re-recorded soon, but you should have a few to get familiar:
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