Shop Talk: Sleigh Bells' Good Bad Music

Last year, Wired editor Robert Capps wrote an article called The Good Enough Revolution in which he argued that your average tech consumer now prefers cheap, simple, sharable products over "quality" gadgets—Google Docs to feature-laden software, easy-to-use video cameras to hi-def camcorders, MP3s to CDs. He cited a study in which Stanford professor Jonathan Berger asked his students each year over six years to rate the musical medium they preferred; as the aughts progressed, an increasing number of them preferred MP3s. Capps suggested that, with music in particular, we not only prefer the ease of the digital format, but we might actually be starting to relish its poor sonic quality—that thin, tinny sound—for its own sake.

In other words, we could be moving toward an aesthetic of shitiness.

It's one thing listening to "the greats" in the 2-D world of the MP3, especially if you've experienced their majesty on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix's blistering "Hear My Train A-Comin'" loses not only its sonic depth when you listen on Lala, but also its sense of place. On the CD version, you can almost hear where the album was recorded; you can hear the bass over here, the flick-and-brush percussion over there, the Stratocaster whining right in front of you. It lends an imaginative depth; you're there in Studio A on April 7th, 1969. But the MP3 version is parsed, clipped. The riffs and melodies are the same, but the depth, the resonance, the scene is gone. You're hearing a song, not an experience.

But what about songs that weren't recorded in a legendary Manhattan studio, on a legendary day, in a legendary year? What about stuff that's being recorded on Garage Band and uploaded straight to MySpace? What about stuff that's made for the MP3?

Take Sleigh Bells: The Brooklyn duo comprised of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss reached buzz band status at 2009's CMJ, got signed to M.I.A.'s N.E.E.T. label and name-dropped by the New Yorker's pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones based only on their MySpace demos. It's rough stuff, made with a cheap drum machine, synthesized guitar sounds with lots of feedback, mics, vocals and only a little bit of live guitar, and its all blown through with bone-rattling distortion. It's not intentionally low-end; Miller told Pitchfork that it's amped up so loud to hide the poor quality of the instruments and technical gear used to make the songs. Either way, it's stuff that blasts through your headphones from the MP3s, rattling your skull with its grainy skuzz.

Of course, making cheap music is nothing new. Toronto duo Crystal Castles has been sampling Atari 5200 glitches in their disconcertingly gorgeous music for nearly 10 years. Flying Lotus creates schizophrenic masterpieces on his laptop. Mixtapes have become the glory of hip-hop. The lo-fi of Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Apples in Stereo was messy and immediate. Drum machines and sampled electro beats overwhelmed the dance floors of San Francisco rave culture all through the '90s. But the growing popularity of Sleigh Bells—for the very reason that their loud, trippy music is so rough and raw—suggests we may be getting used to the poor quality of the made-for-MP3 genre, may actually be on the verge of liking it for its own sake, even if the musicians making it don't.

Do we lose the sense of place we get when we pop in a Hendrix album? Perhaps. But Sleigh Bells' digital singles aren't really about place, after all. It was probably made in a bedroom; there's some romance there, but not the stuff of collaborative jam sessions in upstairs recording rooms, where sacrosanct geniuses like Hendrix breathed in the cool air exhaled by the countless saints of Rock 'n' Roll before him. It's a couple of unknowns in hoodies and jeans in a dusty Brooklyn apartment somewhere, turning knobs and adjusting sound and making music. And it's good enough to be great.