The Giraffe of Rock Records

August 2010

Author: DC

Word count: 880

During the last couple of weeks I have been reading one of Henry Rollin’s journals about his travels and career, the excellently-named “Smile, You’re Travelling”. During 1997 he took a trip to Kenya and Madagascar, and as part of that he went on a safari. Rollins writes wonderfully about being a product of sprawling American cities, of Washington DC and Los Angeles, transplanted to the wilds of the world.

In particular, he talks about being completely astonished by the animals that he saw, and how he found each one more amazing and wondrous than the last. First he saw monkeys with “blue balls”, then baboons with their amazing twisted bodies and protruding backsides, then majestic lions. All of these creatures blow him away but to a degree at least he felt that he know what to think of them, that he had a frame of reference for their looks, their behaviour, their size. Then, however, he sees a giraffe, and has what he would call a “holy shit” moment. It’s not that any of the individual elements of a giraffe were necessarily shocking to him: in isolation he could handle the long legs, the horsey face, the yellowish skin. But put together they made the giraffe totally incredible to him, a creature that took recognizable parts but put them together in a completely different way to anything that he had seen before.

The way we react to records can be a bit like the experience that Rollins describes. You have your monkey records, those that are of a really high quality but are absolutely of their type and somehow how familiar, as if you’ve hard many things similar to them before. You have your red-assed baboon records, which are still somehow comprehensible but add an exciting new twist to the things you have heard before. Then, just occasionally, you have a giraffe record. It’s not totally alien as you can pick out recognizable component parts – guitar riffs, drum lines, vocals, keys, handclaps. But somehow the way that the elements are welded together is surprising and fresh.

While this year has, in my humble opinion, been a genuinely excellent one for music so far, until recently all of my favorite records of the year had been monkeys or baboons. Wonderful, aggressive or romantic, sweeping or claustrophobic records, but all within the realm of what I think I understand. Recently though, I found my giraffe record. I don’t know if it will still astonish me in a few months time, or whether the shock of the new will gradually wear off, just as a giraffe would somehow become more ordinary if you were to see it a hundred times. But for now, it’s all I want to listen to.

That record is "Treats", by Sleigh Bells. It's a deeply strange record in many ways, and not least because it's the product of a hardcore guitarist and a singer who sounds like she's most inspired by the vocal stylings of Gwen Stefani or a “Mickey”-era Toni Basil. Ex-Poison The Well axeman Derek Miller writes the music, which broadly speaking is huge guitar riffs layered over dancey, drum machine boom-bap beats. New Yorker Alexis Krauss sing-chants in a Hollaback Girl fashion over the top.

So far, “Treats” must sound relatively normal, yet another hipster rock-dance crossover record – not even a monkey but a horse, if you will. But then Miller extends its neck by making the record, to put it simply, noisy as fuck. Every guitar tone is overdriven and distorted, every beat hit fuzzy and boomy, the whole production echoey and indistinct. The only thing that comes through clearly is the pseudo-click track of fingersnaps that serves to keep time for the songs. Krauss's vocals aren't pop-crystal-clear either. They swoop into and out of focus in the mix, are equally distorted in recording, and she doesn't really enunciate at all. As a result the vocals almost become another element of the rhythm, rather than the driver of the melody.

That's not to say that there's no variation here - some songs are funloud, others tenderloud, others brutaloud, and some just ecstaticdanceyadrenalinerushloud. But it’s not a record for the faint of heart. And that's perhaps what's so exciting about it - when many rockers seem to be trying to shorten their necks and scrape off their yellow skin to fit in with the horses that get airplay on modern rock radio, Sleigh Bells add more weirdness. More distortion. More noise. And more fun.

The song that steals the deal for me is the album recording of "Crown On The Ground", a song that has been floating around in demo / lo-fi form for a while. Simply put, despite being hopelessly static-ridden, lyrically impenetrable and, yes, loud, it's the most purely fun, exhilarating song I've heard all year. It's more pop fun than every chart number one this year put together. It's more likely to get you dancing than a million Tiesto mixes. And once you've heard it once, it will be the only song you'll want to hear at one in the morning when you're at a club, nicely drunk, and waiting for that one euphoric jam to blow the roof off the place. It's a giraffe in a sea of monkeys.