Album Review: Sleigh Bells - Treats

From the opening notes of their debut album, Treats, it is undeniable: Sleigh Bells is a wrecking ball. The crack production of former Poison The Well guitarist Derek Miller blasts layers of dust from eardrums tired of the same old acts and injects a wholly new sound into your musical landscape: one that is dark, dissonant, confusing, and utterly catchy all at once. Tagged on last.fm as "alternative hip hop", "noise pop", and "dance punk", every one of those labels manages to be 100% correct.

The unlikely pairing of post-hardcore guitarist Miller and former teen-pop artist Alexis Krauss, Brooklyn-based Sleigh Bells is an experiment in the limits of creating pop music from a series of dissonant, often harsh, sounds which on their own jar and befuddle but somehow create a beautiful pastiche that renders all preconceived notions of 'genre' and 'listenability' null and void. Heart-stopping bass thumps, screeching guitars, machine gun snare hits, miscellaneous beeps and bangs, all the while Alexis coos over each track like a new mother over an infant, reducing her voice to a soothing texture amidst the chaos. Only on the ultimate chillout cut, album highlight Rill Rill, does Alexis' voice take center stage and its power is so utterly euphoric that one can forgive the absurdity of the lyrics: "keep thinking about every straight face yes/wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces/what about them/I'm all about them/six such straight A's/cut 'em in the bathroom". I don't know what that means, but more importantly: I don't care. I just want more.

Imagine MIA having a three-way with Karin and Olof from The Knife, and Ratatat is there to remix the result: this gives you an idea of the caliber of genius at work behind Sleigh Bells. From end to end, Treats is a taut, trim, eminently listenable album. More than halfway through 2010 and it has obliterated the competition for 'most listened to record of the year'. It's a credit to Miller's talent that "noise pop" is a contradiction in terms, and yet it describes Sleigh Bells perfectly.