Sleigh Bells, London Lexington

Sleigh Bells

August 9, 2010

Seeing a gig at The Lexington is always a treat; it’s one of the few bars in London that offers a genuinely strong line-up of American beers and bourbons, combined with a large selection of guns and dead stuff on the walls.

Sighing as we finally enter the upstairs area of The Lexington, full of burger and Brooklyn Lager, Becoming Real are winding up a set primarily involving poking laptops, banging drums and generally making noise. Pleasingly hypnotic is the only description I can accurately use to describe them, sounding a little like Tom Tom Club without any of the groove or hip/lame (depending on your frame of reference) vocals.

The burrito-loving Dalston band Teeth are up next, with a much more energetic performance involving a lot of jumping, solo drumming and shouting. With a rather abrasive and electronic-sound, I’d definitely recommend checking out their awesome new single ‘See Spaces’. Interestingly, almost all of their music was being played from a single laptop, which left three questions hanging in the air: how much is actually being contributed live, whether that actually matters and whether they would consider accidentally dropping the machine into a pool of beer.

And these questions are important for an analysis of Sleigh Bells’ performance – well, at least the first two. Their records powerfully loud, incorporating elements of thrash, metal, R ‘n’ B and sugary chart-pop, and I’d been wondering how the two members were going to recreate the sound. But not to worry, for they do just that; and they do it perfectly, in fact.

The only issue is that it is recreated by judicious use of pre-recorded samples, which aren’t obviously triggered or (visibly) activated by a sequencer. Essentially, it becomes difficult to tell what is live and what’s been pre-recorded, with almost all of the tracks incorporating several intertwining guitar tracks, cut up rhythms and blasts of noise. Whether this matters to you is dependent on how important you hold “purity of experience” to be at live gigs, or whether you’re just going to hear the music and get involved.

There’s a lot of opportunity for that for the latter, and with such a short back catalogue to choose from, they manage to play pretty much all the songs I hoped them to play. My favourites, ‘A/B Machines’ and ‘Infinity Guitars’ comes early in the set, though the dark threat of the pinched-by-M.I.A. ‘Treats’ and laid back Californian sunshine of ‘Rill Rill’ seem the most popular with the enthusiastic crowd.

No-one, however, is as enthusiastic as ex-school teacher (damn it, I was sure I was going to get through the review without mentioning the standard issue hook) Alexis Krauss. Throwing herself into the audience and removing layers of clothing like some sort of slamdance of the seven veils, she is perfectly captivating as the focal point of the performance. So much so, in fact, that she distracts from the whole question of what’s live and what isn’t. Which is what’s important in the end, I guess.

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