Sleigh Bells – A Major Irritant

..in the best possible way.

This weekend I spent a short while whipping through my assemblage of digital music on several different devices and .. cleansing it.  So much of it just didn’t deserve to exist. Opening stanza after opening stanza of perfectly ordinary stuff, completely ignorable. So I killed it. It’s less than landfill.

Right now, I haven’t a care about the torrent of dreck foisted upon us in the name of indie because I can just take it or leave it. It’s not moving me either way, and that’s bad – if it feels like a waste of energy to even hate a record, something is seriously wrong.

So I guess it was more in desperation that I popped over to the New York Times site to hear the new stream of the Sleigh Bells sophomore release, Reign of Terror. Finally! The sand in the vaseline, the itch you can’t quite scratch, and something worth getting wound up about.

Brash use of extremely pointy guitars, preposterous hammering digital beats, sheets of noise, cute girly vocals, a pop slant, and probably the best video of a band member jumping on a bed with a rifle you’re ever likely to see (the extremely cute lead singer Alexis Krauss doing the jumping: see below).

Now, on the radio at the weekend, Alexis was fawned over by  the jock, and mid -fawn, she told us Sleigh Bells had listened to more pop music lately, which might account for the hooky tunes on the new record. “You know, George Michael.. Phil Collins, those guys”. Oh, THOSE guys. It was either the most calculated pitch I’ve ever heard or the lass is as innocent as a nine year old and just having a ton of fun. I’m going for innocent and fun. I don’t care what anyone thinks. And yup, I’m going to ignore all the debut album hype, the big-up-ness, the knock-em-down-ity, and just turn this new release to maximum volume and throw away the knob. It’s an absurd record. Absurdly enjoyable.

There’s hope for 2012 after all, folks.