Illustration from Robert Tyas's Flowers and Heraldry, 1851
Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells have one of the biggest buzz albums of the season, and it's one of the most written-about albums as well. There's not much of value that I can add except to say that I like Treats a lot even though it's not really the kind of thing I normally listen to. And I may be able to explain a little about why I like it as well.
I don't follow many of the indie trends these days - I don't really know my chillwave from my darkwave from my post-nouveau-Balearic - but the Sleigh Bells demos that were circulating months ago caught my ear. It sounded like Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss were hitting on something that some of these trendy bands don't bother with - pop dynamics. Sleigh Bells know how to add and subtract sounds and mix them in a song to create a heavy-hitting pop song structure. I do think that they really a little too heavily on the blown-out drumbeats - one or two songs without them would give the album a less headache-inducing relentlessness (the closing title track in particular doesn't need those heavy beats). But Sleigh Bells ends up with a sound halfway between Last Splash-era Breeders and the Go! Team, with a little MIA and Lush thrown in for good measure. And that makes for a pretty good mix.
A couple of the songs on Treats are straight-up filler ("Run the Heart" and the downright crappy "Straight A's") which should be enough to sink a 32-minute album, but the songs have enough momentum to carry through a couple rough spots. And I don't think that the album could survive being any longer than this - it'd cause migraines for some people at half its length. But, if you like fuzzy indie pop with some bite, Treats probably has at least a couple songs that'd fit that title description for you.
"Tell 'Em" by Sleigh Bells
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