Having watched the shelf life for buzz bands grow ever shorter during the late ’00s, Sleigh Bells seemed to understand the need to make the most of their moment. In the wake of their breakthrough debut Treats they worked fast, firing off a couple more LPs within a year of each other, as if trying to refuse the world the chance to forget about them. Though it suffered the inevitable diminishing returns expected from a band that got everything right the first time around, 2012’s Reign of Terror nearly matched the blunt force of their debut, while distinguishing itself just enough with its arena-rock lean. But by their third effort 2013’s Bitter Rivals, the sugar rush had become a headache. The album was genuinely obnoxious in a way its predecessors had only pretended to be, and almost as troubling for a band whose power stemmed from their laser focus—their resolve to drive a single idea, brick on the gas pedal, head first through any obstacle in its path—it was strangely noncommittal.
For their fourth album, Sleigh Bells did something inherently risky for a band so of-the-moment: They took their time, piecing together Jessica Rabbit in stops and starts over three years, and it sounds like it. Recorded in part with Mike Elizondo, the seasoned Los Angeles producer best known for glossing up records for Eminem and his Shady/Aftermath cohorts, it’s a hodgepodge of clashing sounds and concepts that’s united only by its indiscriminate maximalism. Anybody holding out hope for another great, singular inspiration to strike the band again the way it did on their distortion-addled debut probably won’t find it even worth a cursory stream. What the album lacks in vision, though, it attempts to compensate for through sheer exertion. If nothing else, the duo has never seemed to be trying harder than they are here, so although Jessica Rabbit is even more scattershot than Bitter Rivals was, it at least has a sense of showmanship that album didn’t.
The album also smartly runs with the one thing that Bitter Rivals did right: giving more control to singer Alexis Krauss. Krauss had always been the face of Sleigh Bells, their head cheerleader and fun ambassador. Her past as a member of a teen-pop band was central to the group’s mythos, their link to the very music they were subverting. But as integral as she was to the band’s image, Treats didn’t give her all that much to do. Derek Miller’s compressed guitars were so loud, so blown out, that often all Krauss could do was play against them, injecting her airy voice here and there, and even then mostly to make the guitars feel that much heavier in comparison.
On subsequent efforts, Krauss has dialed up the ferocity to the point where she’s no longer juxtaposed against the fray—she is the fray. And as she takes on increased songwriting responsibilities on Jessica Rabbit, she’s also seized the chance to show off her full vocal range. On “Rule Number One,” her voice climbs from a Kesha sneer to a robust Xtina wail as she belts “POP ROCKS AND COKE MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE!” over Miller’s hair-metal riffage. Somehow, she’s even louder than the guitars.
While Krauss relishes the opportunity to play the pop star she never got an actual chance to be, Miller succumbs to a reduced role. His spliced guitars propel “Crucible,” an admirably spirited mashup of circa-’87 Whitney Houston and Licensed to Ill-era Beastie Boys, but it’s hard to even guess what hand he might have had on the Elizondo co-production “I Can Only Stare,” a guitar-free, high-drama pop number closer to something you’d find on a Leona Lewis record than anything on Treats. Similarly, the brooding, EDM-tinged “Unlimited Dark Paths,” as with far too many Elizondo productions, sounds like it was somehow conceived with Skylar Grey in mind.
Even when Jessica Rabbit treads into generic territory, Krauss manages to leave a personal stamp on the material. “I was dreaming of a dead end street that we used to run down,” she sings on “Lightning Turns Sawdust Gold,” over a slinky, lighter-waving groove more than a little inspired by Santigold’s “Disparate Youth.” Elsewhere she calls out a partner who wastes a Friday night getting high and watching The Lion King, the kind of specific, seemingly autobiographic detail that rarely made its way into the first couple Sleigh Bells records. She takes ownership of these songs in a way she never did before.
So Jessica Rabbit is Krauss’s show, and she’s a show worth watching. The problem is it’s just not very catchy. On their first two albums, Sleigh Bells always had a granite hook to balance out the volume. But too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.
