The Jukebox adds its voice to the conversation. Several voices, in fact…

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[6.67]

Anthony Easton: The fight about this band will be like Animal Collective, with loves, and haters, and those people who are indifferent lost among the vitirol.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Sleigh Bells are two people: a guy from some hardcore band and Alexis Krauss from the teenpop group Ruby Blue, which was advertised in a few teen mags as an alternative-ish group that played its own instruments, had a movie soundtrack song or two, then fell off the face of the earth. They’re barely even Googleable now thanks to (not that I begrudge her) Roisin Murphy. Luckily, this is a more-than-decent replacement. “Tell ‘Em” drops Alexis’s rapid-fire pitter patter vocals and big-sister lyrics into what sounds like cherry bombs going off at a football game. It’s the kind of cheerleader anthem real cheerleaders should really take up, and I wouldn’t mind if it became the template for a hundred more songs.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: This is my first exposure to the much-hyped American duo. I like the music, its complex aggression and attack. Singer Alexis seems rather overwhelmed by that, her thin voice nowhere near matching the power of the rest of the sound. It does strike me as a potent and original backing track which needs something better than a weedy indie singer to front it, to create a better balance, but I do like the sound.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: Who the hell decided that this band should be this year’s “Important” Hyped Act? This is repulsive music, kind of like four-month-old leftovers that are starting to smell alarming, inexpertly puréed and served lumpy. There is nothing worthwhile about any aesthetic that values this kind of incompetence; it demeans us all as humans.
[0]

Jonathan Bogart: It’s really very simple. I like small, girlish voices. I like the sensation of being physically assaulted by music. I like big, jacking beats. And more than any of this, I like incongruity. It’s a simple pleasure, perhaps, but a very basic one. Every time I listen I’m still surprised.
[10]

David Moore: I’m just…not getting it. Not geeking out on the noise, such as it is, not digging Alexis Krauss’s relative politeness (kind of representative — TOO POLITE). So why do I care about this band? My wife thinks I’m just being contrarian, overcompensating for the fact that I don’t feel strongly one way or the other but still want to be part of the conversation and have therefore inflated my sense of dislike accordingly. When I played this for her, she said it was OK and then we changed it to something else. So I guess that’s the line I’ll stick with and (politely?) bite my tongue if it comes up again.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The star is the rattling percussion, not the guitars. I expected Kelly Clarkson or Avril Lavigne to emerge from the racket, and a shame they didn’t — this would benefit from a vocalist who can split the difference between assertive and pushy. Indie voices find it difficult (where’s Karen O?).
[7]

Chuck Eddy: It zips, zaps, zooms, and finds a decent tune amid the chaos, which is impressive. But it still seems stuck to one spot on the floor somehow — the clankbeats never quite find a groove that moves. And if the singing does, it still lays back when I wish it was pushing into the forefront. Reminds me of what I liked, and what I didn’t, about the Breeders’ “Cannonball.” Except they did it better. And M.I.A. does it warmer.
[7]

Kat Stevens: My immediate thoughts upon hearing this: “OMG Lolita Storm are back!Back!BACK! I wonder why they’ve roped in a couple of American cheerleaders to do the vocals for them?” Later, once I’d calmed down a bit, it was clear that the rest of the album was far more like the Breeders skipping in the playground than any output from Digital Hardcore (except “Straight A’s” which could totally have been a bonus track on Red Hot Riding Hood). But before such reasonable thoughts could get a word in edgeways I had to deal with the rousing CRUNCH NOISE RAAAAR THUMP CRACK that was telling me to 1) flee for the hills and await the four horsepersons 2) shave my head and join a radical commune devoted to earplug awareness 3) round up my old elastics schoolchums and teach them a new jumping rhyme 4) find a clip on Youtube of that bit near the end of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey where they finally learn to play the guitar properly and it half sounds like they’re going to do Hendrix’s “Stars And Stripes” but it ends up being a Kiss track. It didn’t matter what I did really, as long as I did something – because now I had got off my backside and I had punched the air and I would and could and must do ANYTHING.
[10]