Review Summary: your pop metal dream came true
Few acts take half as much glee as Sleigh Bells in erasing the boundary between good and bad taste. How? Maybe their lurid take on pop maximalism goes a little hard on aesthetic carnage (jagged metal guitars x a fruit machine's worth of shiny synth tones x roof-raising holler x nifty industrial flourishes), maybe their shiteating grin takes indecent relish flashing a full set of rotten cavities, and maybe Alexis Krauss' is
very happy for the weight of her vocals to rest on fractious subject matter (
Even looking real bad, I feel good / When I'm feeling so sad, I feel good) — but the bottom
line is that the whole package benefits from such ruthlessly dialled-in songwriting and dispenses great hooks so freely that it's a sod's game to keep track of where tongue meets cheek or pathos gives way to quirk. Uh huh!
Krauss and guitarist-producer Derek Miller have air-quotes gottit, and their latest record
Bunky Becky Birthday Boy (fucking right) takes on their brief with an extra dose of sunshine. This thing throws itself into any number of saccharine earworms ("Roxette Ric") and goonish singalongs ("Badly"), its brash arena chords a good match for some of the duo's most energising material to date. It's apt that the album highlight "This Summer" is also the most unapologetically poppy, its breathless pacing a runway for one electric zinger after another: no frills big stupid ecstasy, pop perfection, consume it, explode, repeat, mmm…! Bar the oddly portentous lyric
recognise patterns / some of this matters (so affirmative, so insecure!), there isn't a single thrill on this track that you won't have encountered in some form before; Sleigh Bells' steadfast conviction and volatile levels of gratification practically makes a joke of this. No complications.
The same, unfortunately, does not go for the whole album: an awkward proportion of these tracks seem set on retreading the peaks of the band's 2021 juggernaut
Texis without offering the same breadth or impact. "Life Was Real"'s underwhelming reboot of "True Seekers" is the most glaring example here, but the likes of "Real Special Cool Thing" and "Can I Scream" are all too happy to dip into well-worn hooks and cadences, and don't stick around long enough to lay down their own distinctions. The album's relatively narrow focus does it few favours here; its reluctance to experiment outside of sparkly, quickfire bangers inadvertently spotlights how the appeal of its weaker cuts is directly interchangeable with that of the highlights. The one true showstopper only furthers this impression: "Hi Someday"'s sudden foray into electro-industrial suspense comes as such a welcome shift of gears in the album's final stretch that the rearview mirror immediately casts an unkindly tint over the previous tracks' sugar crimes.
The relatively earnest approach of closer "Pulse Drips Quiet" leaves a similar aftertaste, paring back the hook barrage and leaning into desperation for its rousing chorus. It's a strong track on its own terms, but ratcheting the pathos so far up at the very end of such a resolutely lightweight tracklist suggests a greater emotional impact that
Bunky Becky Birthday Boy has long since declined to deliver. Does it sell itself short as such? One hundo, but at the end of the day no one is playing pig squeals over handclaps and sounding half so fleet for it. Party to this party album or, like, fucking don't. Not a hard choice.
