Saturday night’s headlining performance at the 9:30 Club by Sleigh Bells rang familiar for anyone who has seen them before. There was the darkened stage, lit with intermittent flashes of LED bank strobes. As thunderous chords of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” began, Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manifested. The wall of supplemental Marshall amps behind them emitted the piercing intro of “Crown on the Ground” as Krauss began to pant. Déjà vu set in.
The noise pop duo’s performance at Rock and Roll Hotel at the beginning of last summer — perhaps one of the most hyped D.C. shows of that year — began exactly this same way. So did their set the following autumn at a side stage at Merriweather Post Pavillion during Virgin Mobile FreeFest. There is a fine line between shamanistic ritual in a live performance, and going through the motions. Following the same set list month after month, year after year, edges into the territory of more established cult bands, a privilege Sleigh Bells has yet to earn.
When Treats first leaked a year and a half ago, “Crown on the Ground” was jarring — a reboot. Now, it’s nostalgic. As an audience, it’s possible we’ve been conditioned to expect too much, too fast, too soon. Treats is the only full Sleigh Bells album to date, and it leaked and gained momentum before it could even be officially released. A blessing and a curse: are those eleven tracks all anyone wants to hear? With a punishing touring schedule, have they had time to write new material?
Following the standard intro, the pair played the album in its entirety, moving to “Tell ‘Em,” “Kids,” and the crowd pleaser “Infinity Guitars,” before adding “Holly” from their 2009 debut EP. A respite came in the form of “Rill Rill,” their most popular single to date which happens to sound nothing like the rest of the album. The crazed finale of “A/B Machines” reminded everyone why we came here — Derek and Alexis know what they’re doing. For a band that prides itself on breaking convention and generating an atmosphere of debauched chaos, we have to hope that they’ll follow that old business adage: innovate or die.
They could take a page from their co-headliners for the evening: CSS. Adriano Cintra and Lovefoxxx formed CSS — short for “Cansei de Ser Sexy,” a literal Portugeuse translation of Beyonce’s off-hand remark, “I got tired of being sexy” — in their native Sao Paolo as a lark, but have given their artfully irreverent pop themes staying power with energetic performances. They manage to make five-year-old singles sound fresh again by mixing up the old and new. “Music Is My Boyfriend” lost its Apple-commercial fatigue, “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” made the crowd go wild, and “Alala” delivered as much raw, angry energy as “A/B Machines” would for Sleigh Bells later on.
CSS has continued to write and tour with the necessary breaks over the better part of the last decade; Miller and Krauss could learn something from them. With a new album coming out in August on Sub Pop, it was clear from Saturday night’s show that they certainly haven’t lost the lustre of the new rave wave.
