Treats is not a record for coming down on a Sunday morning. It’s a rager. It’s a club at 3 AM, packed with beautiful people and cigarette smoke. It’s snorting lines of cocaine and chasing it down with shot after shot of whiskey. It’s waking up in your trendy loft apartment and trying to figure out just what the hell happened last night.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, Harrison Bergeron, the smartest people in society are forced to wear earpieces that transmit excessively loud noises when they have an intelligent though. This is what Sleigh Bells sounds like. Treats is an abrasive record, full of clanging keyboards, charging guitars and skull-obliterating drums. The noise is almost overpowering, but there is a layer of sweetness that runs through, and her name is Alexis Krauss.
The opening track, “Tell ‘Em,” begins with three rapid-fire drum fills followed by churning stabs of guitar. In the middle of all this mayhem, Krauss comes in. Her voice is girlish and sweet, similar to Ronnie Spector. She rarely changes her inflection and the lyrics are almost unintelligible over the chaos, but her presence shows that Sleigh Bells is more than distortion. Underneath the layers of noise, they are essentially a pop band.
Sleigh Bells is the brainchild of former Poison the Well guitarist, Derek Miller. You can see shades of his former band in the guitar, which is insistent and grating. However, he also has a gift for dance grooves, exemplified by the single, “Crown on the Ground.” Although everything is mixed in the red, the groove is irresistible. Using a mixture of distorted guitars and industrial keyboards, Miller created an alternate universe version of DMX’s “Party Up.” When something is mixed to maximum capacity, it’s easy to get caught up in the noise and forget about the music. With Sleigh Bells, the hooks come first.
The highlight of the album is “Infinity Guitars,” which sums up the band’s aesthetic in three and a half minutes. It’s a simple arrangement; just a guitar riff and some drums. The guitar and drums are loud, but much softer than the rest of the album. It lumbers along for the first couple of minutes, with Krauss singing demurely overtop of it. At this point, “Infinity Guitars,” is the most conventional song on the album, but it switches gears in the final minute. The riff doesn’t change, but the intensity does. Krauss is barking, trying to keep up with the hurricane behind her. Sleigh Bells changed gears so rapidly that I found myself knocked back. It’s a devastating moment.
It’s trite to suggest that a record needs to be played at maximum volume, but it’s really the only way to listen to Treats. If your brain isn’t slamming against the back of your skull, you aren’t listening to it correctly. It’s a beautiful piece of noise