Brooklyn noise-pop duo Sleigh Bells has rescheduled their Treats 10th Anniversary Show for September 9, 2021. While it was originally planned for May 10, 2020 at Brooklyn Steel, they switched the venue to Webster Hall. It had first been announced on March 10 last year, just a few days before they had to call it off.
Vocalist Alexis Krauss announced the new date, saying “We finally get to have our 10 year anniversary show, 11 years later!!! Come hang with us @websterhall on 9/9/21. Special guests to be announced.” She also gave some details on tickets, which can be found here starting at $30. Those who purchased tickets for the 2020 Brooklyn Steel show can either have their tickets rollover to the new date/location or request a refund from their original point of purchase within the next 30 days.
Treats was Sleigh Bells’ debut album and easily their most popular. Cult favorites like “Rill Rill,” “Crown on the Ground” and “Infinity Guitars” have carved out the band’s place in music history. The album was originally released on May 24th, 2010 via Mom+Pop/N.E.E.T. Recordings. While it’s best known for “Rill Rill,” which is a cleaner, more accessible song built around a sample of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That,” the rest of the album is generally beloved for its unique & influential style of noise-pop. All 11 tracks display the forward-thinking talent of vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist/producer Derek Edward Miller.
Krauss had been in a small teen pop group called RubyBlue, and Miller had been the guitarist for popular metalcore band Poison the Well when they linked up as Sleigh Bells. Krauss explained how the album came together during an interview with Drowned in Sound back in 2010. They were actually connected by UK hip hop artist MIA through director Spike Jonze.
“Before Derek and I had even played a show, in September last year. Spike Jonze was actually the one who played her a couple of our demos over his iPhone so you can imagine how good it sounded. But she was immediately taken by it and she emailed Derek.”
Miller was asked to produce her song “Meds and Feds” from MAYA (2010). Then Sleigh Bells were signed to MIA’s Universal/Interscope subsidiary, N.E.E.T., in a partnership with their other label, Mom + Pop. Krauss and Miller had just been sending each other demos, but Krauss explains, “When we got into the studio we began collaborating more. There’s a few tracks on the album – ‘Tell Em’, ‘Riot Rhythms’, ‘Tell the Heart’- which definitely became more collaborative in terms of me doing more work on melodies, harmonies and we plan on further explorations of this in the future.”
One comment she made on the sound of the record was how she experimented with her vocals, “The vocals in Sleigh Bells is much different from traditional pop hits where they are sitting on top of the entire mix. The vocals become an instrument on the record. So it’s much more about the texture, being integral to the song and the impact as a whole more than the individual parts. The vocal is about blending, rubbing against another sound, much less about ‘here I am’.”
They released three other studio albums together, Reign of Terror (2012), Bitter Rivals (2013) and Jessica Rabbit (2016). Recently, they’ve just been sharing covers of songs like the Lead Belly-popularized folk song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” and the Two Minutes to Late Night collaborations that Krauss recorded of Guns n’ Roses’ “Rocket Queen” and ‘90s club medley.
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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