Review Summary: Dashing through the snow, in a one riff open Sleigh...
"...And now from the doldrums of Williamsburg. Weighing in at 100 pounds combined. The misers of misery. The bringers of brutality. The...former schoolteacher and guitarist for an emo band...Is that...Is that right? Yeah? Alright. Uhhh, Sleigh Bells everybody. I'll be in the can if anyone needs me".
Sleigh Bells could probably be the worst band name ever used. If it were Slay Bells, or xSlayerBellsx than maybe it'd be better, but that's not really up to me. Nonetheless, Sleigh Bells are a two piece duo hipster hop band from Brooklyn. Alexis is a former schoolteacher, which lends greatly to the image of leather jackets and screaming guitars. Of course. And the other guy, Derek Miller, played in
Poison The Well for 6 years when he was really quite young. I'm not terribly acquainted with Poison The Well, but I'm pretty sure it falls on the side of more emo hardcore/metalcore. No problem there though. Their past adventures have little to do with their current project, and it's only right to discuss the music, not the people.
After releasing 2 previous albums (2010's "Treats", and 2012's "Reign of Terror"), Sleigh Bells have gained a horde of both admirers and dejectors. "Treats" was light years ahead of and better than "Reign of Terror" in my opinion, with a more subdued production and just better songwriting. "Reign of Terror" was an exhibit in extremely loud nothingness, which was just loud for the sake of loud. Now, just a short year or so later, they've released a new one, entitled "Bitter Rivals".
"Bitter Rivals" is like a humongous box of chocolates. It's sweet, it's sugary, it's a little nuts, and if you were to devour it whole you'd die from diabetes. The instrumentation is boisterous booming and banging guitar over heavily distorted bass drums, and the occasional clapping sound. When I say boisterous, I mean boisterous. It's really overly loud. Like if Led Zeppelin were to be played at 300 decibels, than tunneled through a funnel of reverb. It's noise pop. I understand that. But the production is sometimes so out of hand it's almost hard to listen to.
I say it's sweet and sugary because Alexis Krauss' vocals sound very Radio Disney ready on most tracks. Almost always in this breathy, high octave, it can be sort of grating after a little while. Take the nearest 13 year old mallrat off Radio Disney, and place their vocals over the instrumentation, and you'd be hard pressed to find much difference. That's fine as it is, but the real cringe begins when she begins to scream and rap, enacting both Henry Rollin's much less scary sister, and a little bit of Eazy-E in his comedically bad later years of rapping. It just comes off as horribly out of place, and really makes no sense at all. "Minnie" is just ridiculous. There's an element of everything I say is wrong with this album on that track. But that's not to say to say it's not catchy as all hell. That's what sugary, sweet music is. It's catchy.
Derek Miller is certainly a talented guitarist. You can hear the influence of his former musical goings about in the tunes here. The riffs are almost always in the sort of breakdown-y format you'd expect from someone who played in a hardcore band. There are some shining moments for his guitar work, tracks such as "Tiger Kit" and even the title track "Bitter Rivals" really are exhibits in guitar work, with some pretty sick riffs thrown in there. But, sadly, most of the time, he opts to go with the dun-dun-dun-duh-dun-dun-dun riff over and over rather than break off into scales or pentatonics or even just something different. Derek Miller is talented as a guitarist, no doubt about that. If the music allowed more space to advance, he'd shine on it. But it just stagnates as same over same, track after track.
In conclusion, "Bitter Rivals" is really not bad. It's not great. It's just sort of is what it is. There's a lot of distortion, some whiny vocals, a a lot of catchiness. You'll listen to it and forget almost everything you heard almost immediately. If Sleigh Bells have any desire to stay in this industry, especially with the way trends come and go, they'll need to go back to the drawing board and get some new ideas. If their fourth album is going to sound exactly like their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, than I think the cries from the negative reviews will only get louder. Loud as the production they use. If maybe Derek Miller played a real riff more often, and the music wasn't released sounding like a large box of messy .wav, maybe, just maybe, Sleigh Bells can be seen as what they are. Two talented people making music they shouldn't.
