I Wonder What Your Boyfriend Thinks About Your Braces

Sleigh Bells -- Treats

And the winner is....Sleigh Bells! Winner of what? They're the artist in my Acts To Watch: 2010 list who are first to hit the market with a full-length album. Treats was released May 11 and my speaker system, inner ear, and the retired cop downstairs who knows me only as "the a-hole who plays electric bass at 3 AM" have regretted it ever since. The songs make like some misproduced diabolical incarnation of bitch-girl pop-rap. Remember those first-generation headphone jack speakers you used to connect to your discman to create a ghetto-ass portable stereo? Imagine turning the volume up on those as high as possible -- so they're all crackly and shit -- and pressing them against your ears. "Just turn the volume down, moron," you might say. It doesn't quite work like that. Believe me, I tried -- this music just demands to be played at full volume, and if you try to turn it down, well, you can't.

So here's a question you might ask: is it any good? Yeah, it's pretty good. But there's too much going on here to get caught up in that debate just yet. You might turn your nose up at my association of Sleigh Bells with "bitch-girl pop-rap" -- like, who needs more Ke$ha? It's hard to describe what I'm talking about until you hear it. In hindsight it seems like an obvious maneuver, but the Brooklyn-based duo seem to have one day woken up with the idea of combining trendy off-kilter production and indie ethics with bum-rush, beat-based dance jams. Except that description's an understatement. These songs will elicit bodily movements more carnal and voracious than harmless dance (insert "that's what she said" joke here), and the production completely flips the bird to any conventions of respectful input mixing. The songs are usually formed around some over-gained synth or guitar lick, underscored with syncopating clappy sounds and other bass-heavy percussive thumping, topped off with the rich multitracked vocals of babe-and-a-half leadwoman Alexis Krauss -- and then punched into three dimensions with a crank to 11 of every knob on the soundboard.


it's not just youtube, it actually sounds like that.

Now back to whether it's actually good. I, and most other sources, believe that, yes, Treats is good. However, I (1) think I find the concept of the music more intriguing than the music itself, and (b) find it, by the end of the album, quite honestly a tad annoying. Maybe I'm just not "ready" for it. But, I don’t know, I just can’t picture myself ever being unwaveringly appreciative of hearing Alexis recite in monotone “Got my A-machines on the table, got my B-machines in the drawer” thirty-four times over alternating patterns of screeching static in “A/B Machines”. Elsewhere, brief blurts of noise like “Rachel” and “Straight A’s” seem superfluous besides to reinforce the testy demeanor of the album. In general, the music seems less concerned with being good than with offending; more intent on existing than being listened to.

But isn’t that what rock and roll is all about? I keep thinking of Run-DMC: though acknowledged as pioneers of rap, the music they made was, all at once, rock and roll, just a new approach. Maybe that's what Sleigh Bells are -- a new approach to rock and roll. Nevermind whether it's good. It pushes boundaries, insists on itself, and promises to offend parents everywhere – sounds like rock to me. Like so many before them, the duo find new ways of fashioning chaos and destruction into a coherent concept of music. Whether that concept is something beautiful and something worthwhile to listen to is up to the listener to decide. But it I can tell you this much: it is certainly something, something to behold and something to ponder, and, in the case of me, something to blast incessantly at max volume until the dude downstairs is pounding his ceiling with a broomstick like that time when I was playing my electric bass at 3 AM, my bad. I suspect I'm not alone.