Sleigh Bells ‘Reign of Terror’

                Sleigh Bells are back. Take that loud volume. Make it louder. Take that guitar riff. Put it through some distortion. Take that vocal. Make it sexier. Use the idea of colossal dollops distortion and noise to explore new ways of producing dumb, good old fashioned rock and roll. 

                No mistakes about it, I like this better. Their first album I remember having certain reservations about it. Before I felt a lot of their riffs and production values reminded me of mid-nineties Beck with the volume put up but they’ve changed. 

                With ‘Reign of Terror’ Sleigh Bells seems to be cementing a strange kind of personality. It is anthem rock, I mean; the whole damn thing is chock-full of anthems. Their last album had many of these same tricks. Yet I feel a lot of these ideas are better used. Basically they had hooks before but they didn’t interest me as much. 

                I have no idea how this will do with the Pitchforks, Tiny Music Tapes, and other sites of this blog-o-sphere. Those sites seemed to adore their debut, giving it ‘Best New Music’ status, 8.7 statuses, and four star statuses respectively. I know I like this a lot more than their debut. I’m not sure why. Maybe I needed to be converted. Perhaps it is the emotion and (dare I say it) violent sweetness of the whole thing. For all the noise, the chaos, the blasting drums, and screeching guitars this is a sincere record. I mean it. Before I thought it was a lot of posturing, a lot of posing, without substance. Now I get the impression of a personality behind the noise. 

                Hopefully others agree with me. That would be nice. But I really enjoyed this quite a bit. A few people I played it for called it ‘Satanic’. Anything labeled Satanic is alright with me, by golly. Thankfully it has leaked thanks to the extreme incompetence of the New York Times website. So have a listen. Let me know what you think. Is all the hype Sleigh Bells built up worth it?