Sleigh Bells--'Treats'

I went to see Sleigh Bells, the duo made up of guitarist/producer Derek Miller and vocalist Alexis Krauss, perform on the night of my sister’s wedding. I took my sister with me. Okay, so my sister got married in the afternoon, and it was my other sister that I took to the show. Still, Sleigh Bells seems out of context in a discussion of weddings, or maybe just ultra-conservative (I mean this in the best possible way, and there was alcohol involved) weddings like my sister’s. Her wedding was an illustration of transcendent beauty and tried-and-true tradition, (re)union and restraint. Sleigh Bells, on the other hand is all excess and explosion, violence and vitality.

And this is how Treats, Sleigh Bells’ debut, plays out on first listen. In fact, it sounds like they’ve taken all the parts of rebel music your parents hated—the drum patterns and heavy bass of hip-hop, the electric guitar of heavy rock, the static of shitgaze (if your parents know what that is)—and created a coherent, danceable mass of energy. Try on “Crown on the Ground”—my own introduction to Sleigh Bells—for size: it begins with a rambunctious, ear-splitting guitar riff, drums pulled straight from the Neptunes’ repertoire, handclaps on top, before detonating into a huskier, more banging guitar riff over those incredible drums and the handclaps on top. All of the songs (with the exception of the acoustic, celebratory, chill-hoppy “Rill Rill” and the interlude-ish, electric freak-out of “Straight A’s”) unfold similarly, some synth-ier (“Run the Heart,” “Rachel”), some with more emphasis on the sadistic guitars (“Tell ‘Em”).

Let’s face it: Treats is straight-up wildin’ out music, especially when you take into account Alexis Krauss’ hypnotic, beckoning vocals. Yet is there more to it than this? Granted, “this” seems a significant musical success, a deft blending of genres resulting in something abrasive and inviting. (I certainly hope no one ever said the same of Limp Bizkit, and I shudder to think someone might have.)

The depth of Treats—and ultimately what rockets the album from passing crunk fad to something approaching greatness—resides in Sleigh Bells’ lyrics, which explore a space between religisexual ecstasy and high school drama. The high school drama aspect is the more obvious of the two, if only because the album art is plastered with pictures of cheerleaders (with their faces obliterated no less) and football fans. The lyrics are also obviously injected with a heavy dose of teenage angst: “Six sets, straight As, cut him in the bathroom,” Krauss intones on “Rill Rill,” while on “Run the Heart,” she threatens, “You take her heart, I can take out you.”

However, many of the album’s words aren’t words at all. Almost all of the songs on Treats simmer with “ahs,” heavy breathing, and other primeval sounds. And these aren’t Spencer Krug’s animal/barbarian/taunting explorations of genre and voice, either. Instead, they seem to acknowledge the sheer force and quasi-supernatural elements of the music it’s almost impossible to complement. Krauss’ sounds are the longings of body and spirit to coalesce with and become deity. “Crown on the Ground” (if you haven’t realized by now, the album’s most resonant track, even if everyone who has heard of Sleigh Bells knew this track before they heard Treats) then forms a kind of apotheosis for Sleigh Bells’ lyrical exploration on Treats. “Set-sets that crown on the ground” goes the refrain, and you can hear it as the stomping into the ground of the homecoming queen’s rhinestone tiara, the acknowledgment of a greater force at work than the human voice (even if this greater force is only that of the machines used to create the music), and the crowning of the ground itself, the manifestation of the greater force in the earthquake of bass and dancing.

So back to my sister’s wedding: Perhaps an album that unifies such an awesome variety of elements—chant, hip-hop, high school, lo-fi—isn’t so very far away from an event that brings together a hodge-podge of random people (and comes off smoothly). Additionally, maybe Treats taps into a kind of refined beauty, just one that only youth can fathom. Whatever. I’m happy for my married sister, but seeing Sleigh Bells live confirmed that they (and, by extension, Treats) throw a more exciting—and elemental—party.