Treats by Sleigh Bells
LABEL: Mom + Pop Music

If the Brooklyn scene is united by any one factor it would be its defiance towards pop music's standard tropes—there, perhaps, but most certainly not there. Brooklyn band Crystal Stilts reduced Alan Freed's proverbial big beat to a tinny glimmer. The Vivian Girls, also a Brooklyn act, stubbornly conceal winsome lyrics in  judicious dollops of echo. The young insurgents in Brooklyn's Fiasco amiably set up offstage, with the audience surrounding the band "in the round."

“Boy and girl stand out amid the impenetrable melange with Bonham-via-Diplo beats and a bluesy guitar that is almost unreal, attracting Bed-Stuy's own M.I.A....”

In that light, those who cast the usual curse on the unremitting gentrification in the borough of churches are likely to find the cosmology of Sleigh Bells nauseating at best—restaurant worker-cum-starving post-hardcore guitarist meets girl; boy and girl haul laptop and guitar to the veritable circus that is the annual CMJ trade show, a smorgasbord of the wizened past (yes, you too can sit in on a semi-academic panel with such greying luminaries as George Clinton and 2 Live Crew!) and what is (more often than not, unlikely) to come. Boy and girl stand out amid the impenetrable melange with Bonham-via-Diplo beats and a bluesy guitar that is almost unreal, attracting Bed-Stuy's own M.I.A., blogosphere adulation, and a musically polyamorous mainstream reared on Drake and Vampire Weekend in the process. Treats, their rush-released debut, has almost succeeded in its furtive ambush of the malls of America, reaching #39 in the Billboard 200.

“...even the more egregious moments on Treats are not enough to derail an album that charges past the pensive somnolence of so much contemporary indie.”

Like its immediate spiritual progenitors (DJ Shadow’s ...Entroducing, Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, Napalm Death’s Scum), Treats is a conceptual tour de force whose seeds will blossom in the magnanimous thrall of the Internet over the next decade or so. However, while there is no doubt that Derek Miller may be the first of his contemporaries to successfully transubstantiate the grimy future aesthetic of Burroughs and Gibson into pop music (succeeding in an arena that has vanquished everyone from Achtung Baby Eno to Pete Rock and a litany of chillwave auteurs), this project's debut is far more facile in spots than the compliant reviews would suggest.

While the heady strains of “A/B Machines” and the bricklayer of “Rachel” easily rank among the most memorable songs of the year, their success is immediately compromised by their M.I.A.-like, beat-laden tracks, "Crown on the Ground” and “Infinity Guitar,” which can’t decide if it's this year's “Psychic City” or a Bikini Kill cover of “Sabotage.” In the middle of the pack,“Rill Rill” evinces a range that isn't necessarily apparent on the other tracks, leaving one to wonder if an expanded lineup would only enhance the duo's formative gifts; the distended pulse of “Straight As” harkens back to Miller's punk roots.

Rounding out at an exceedingly brief 32 minutes, even the more egregious moments on Treats are not enough to derail an album that charges past the pensive drowsiness of so much contemporary indie. Whether they like it or not, Miller and Krauss have demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are the shape of things to come.


REVIEWED BY SEAN MURPHY
SEAN’S FAVORITE TRACKS: “Straight As” • “A/B Machines” • “Rill Rill”



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