You're just a weatherman, we make the wind blow

A band that got a lot of buzz towards the end of last year is the duo Sleigh Bells. Fuzzy, synthy, loud guitary goodness with a bad ass vocalist in Alexis Krauss. They're set to play Coachella this year, were a break out band at CMJ, have been written about in the New York Times and their song "Crown on the Ground" was even chosen as one of the best tracks of 2009 by Pitchfork. 2010 will certainly be very good to them. Besides the fact that they write pretty infectious songs, I love that guitarist Derek Miller is the same Derek Miller (formally) from Poison the Well.

I think it's pretty normal for most music addicts like myself to go through different music phases in our lives. That's generally how our overall music taste develops. Grunge, punk, metal, goth, hardcore, whatever. In college, my friend Melina was big into hardcore when we met and she introduced me to bands like Braid, Vision of Disorder and Zao. (We were also dressing in boys clothes and wore chucks and Pumas all the time but that's a story for another time). When Napster was getting hot on our campus, Poison the Well was one of the bands she discovered while doing her daily music searches. We fell in love with them immediately.

We went to their shows whenever we could, including one at Under the Couch on Tech's campus where some kid got naked at their end of their set and started moshing (naked, skinny hardcore dude = not so good). We even drove the four hours to North Carolina to see them once too, although I can't remember the name of the venue. I used to check their tour diary on the Trustkill site regularly (did they really meet Tom Cruise in Olive Garden and give him their record? I'll never really know) and even pre-ordered Tear From the Red so that I could get the free poster that came along with it. Seriously, I loved them.

Then a few months later, I discovered "indie rock" (meaning bands that I actually had to do research to find out about, which was kind of a completely new and interesting idea to me) and thus began a new music phase in my life. While I stopped following them, it seems as though Poison the Well is still doing very well so it may seem crazy that someone from a pretty successful band would leave. But that's what Derek did. The music he made with PTW was great, but the stuff he's doing with Sleigh Bells is refreshing.

I love musicians that make music you don't expect them to make or listen to bands that you think they'd never listen to. It's hard to do something different these days. As Metric's Emily Haines sang in Dead Disco, "Everything has been done." So it's nice when you hear a song that catches you off guard and that's what Sleigh Bells has done for me. Also, kudos to Alexis for once being a school teacher in the Bronx. I know it's super far away from all the cool shit, but there are some cool people here :) Check out a video of "Infinity Guitars" below.