Sleigh Bells were the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend. The Brooklyn noisy-pop band played two songs from its forthcoming Reign of Terror album (out tomorrow on Mom + Pop).
I like the band – I think their songs are quite catchy: they do a great job of balancing an aggressive, noisy exterior with bubblegum pop harmonies. I don’t think their performance on ‘SNL’ was the most dynamic, but that is typically a rough place to play. I’m anxious to see those songs played live at the Showbox on Friday night.
The opinion from a lot of my Facebook and Twitter friends seemed to be that it was terrible. I didn’t learn a lot as to why, with the most common dismissal being “this is hipster shit, it sucks.” I don’t know if part of it was a backlash against ‘SNL”s recent music guests, who have been disasters: Karmin and Lana Del Rey. What did you, lovely readers of Another Rainy Saturday, think? Feel free to add your opinion to the comments below. I’ll include the videos below so you can judge for yourself, if you haven’t seen it yet (or want to watch again).
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I wasn’t familiar with Sleigh Bells before SNL, so this was my first listen. They left me cold, but not completely turned off. I thought three things about what I saw. One was that the vocals were mixed too far back; but that’s part of my songwriter bias. If you’re going to sing words, I’d like to hear them, because I want to care about your story. The second thing I noticed was that the vocals seemed off key. Both of these could have been due to a bad mix on stage or front-of-house. I’ve been in that brand of hell before, and it’s not the band’s fault.
My third impression was that if you’re going to rely on canned drums, they should drive the song better. I thought they were stiff. Maybe that was a bad mix too, or maybe that’s their artistic choice. I will look them up online and see if I can catch some more performances.
It could also be that in the age of loops, samplers, and Pro Tools, a band can build a sound that kicks ass in the studio and doesn’t work as well live. Lana Del Rey and the Ting Tings spring to mind…
I really liked Sleigh Bells’ first album, and I just streamed the new one today (not bad, but I don’t like it as much). However, I thought their performance on SNL was as terrible as both Lana Del Rey’s AND Karmin’s…I was looking forward to it after those trainwrecks, but ended up fast-forwarding the second performance mid-way through. Sleigh Bells is jammin’ in the studio, but it just doesn’t translate to the SNL stage…hopefully theater performances will be better than that. Whomever Lorne Michaels employs to book weekly acts on SNL this year should be fired.
Honestly the music performance was shit you could barely here her over the overly loud guitar and when you could her voice was scratchy. Just my opinion sorry.