The Sleigh Bells show got sold out very fast and the old-fashioned El Rey theater was packed on Wednesday night with people waiting patiently for what it seemed a very long time, Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller were making themselves very desirable around 11 pm.
The show started with some metal music hurling in the dark (Slayer? Someone shouted ‘South of Heaven!!!’), the ambiance suddenly turned to the dark side, then church bells chimed, obviously announcing the arrival of the Sleigh duo. A thunderstorm of electric guitar and hard drum beats blasted from the wall of speakers in the back of the stage and on their first song ‘Tell’Em’, the woman who was definitively the star of the night, began to sing and move back and forth to the edge of the stage, doing her assaulting Powwow dance to the crowd with a crescendo of energy, the crowd witnessing only half of them because of the incessant blinking lightning.
The hyper saturated sound accompanied by the constant flashing light, became a solid presence, like a third person on stage who was dancing with Alexis, and I don’t think anybody was watching Derek Miller anymore.
People became even more ecstatic when they played the more melodious ‘Rill rill’ during which the lights stop blinking for a while; this song curved on itself many times, slowly moving up and up like something that wants to take off, unfolding its layers of smooth sounds and its exalting ‘ho ho ho’, as sexually charged as the dance moves of Alexis Krauss.
She did a pretty and well-received crowd dive at the end of the blasting ‘Crown on the ground’ that sounded more like an eruption of noisy and hard white lights than a real song. Most of the songs (like ‘Straight A’s’, ‘A/B machines’, ‘Kids’, ‘Riot Rhythm’, ‘Treats’) were like that anyway, a total chaos of hard and pounding beats in a dark and silver discotheque ambiance.
The set was extremely short, only around 30 minutes, but the sound was massive, abrasive, aggressively bold and had surely the potential to make anybody deaf in a few minutes, but people didn’t care at all, they had in fact come precisely for the violent loudness of the music, the bloody ache in the eardrum, the gigantic punch in the stomach and the bold attitude of Alexis Krauss.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DesM3xUwmoM