Sleigh Bells and CSS. It’s almost as if they were meant to tour together. Two bands that I’ve only seen briefly at festivals. Two bands with overly energetic female vocalists. Both playing together at one of my favorite venues in town at the time of year where it was still a little to early for St. Andrew’s Hall to fully overheat (well, at least before the show started). Tonight was going to be a good show, and there was going to be a ton of energy spewed forth by everyone and everything in the building.
CSS, led by the ever charismatic Lovefoxx, hit the stage around 8:30 and gave the crowd their Brazilian flare full force. Having only seen them from afar at Coachella (where Lovefoxx crowd surfed at least 3 times that I counted), I wasn’t quite aware of just how much fun they were all having on stage until I got to see it up close. They brought it HARD, yet somehow some of the folks up front still found a way not to enjoy themselves (shame on you, people up front) even though the rest of us were soaking it all in. As Lovefoxx stripped down from pants and jacket to jorts and a red cutoff tshirt that said “TRASH” on it, her presence only grew and when the set ended, I only wanted them to come back out and play again. I only wish the crowd had given them a little more of what they deserved, but hopefully they’ll make a second appearance in Detroit as I believe this was their first ever. I mentioned to a friend of mine that if I was in a band, this is the type of band I’d want to be in. A band with bangin’ beats that you can tell are actually having a great time on stage instead of just going through the motions.
After a brief intermission in which just about all of the gear was cleared off stage minus a guitar and a few microphones, Sleigh Bells (aka Slay Bells) took the stage to “Iron Man”, a perfectly fitting entrance. And then it was all bets off. The lights flashed almost incomprehensibly throughout the set, a wonderful visual as a fan, but a dreadful one as a photographer, with Alexis Kraus doing her usual scream/sing combination and giving the crowd plenty of energy from which to feed. She climbed all over the stage and into the pit a few times (much to the delight of the 20 or so girls who had worked their way in front of the barricade, essentially trapping us photographers in the pit, not that I minded) eventually doing a brief crowd surf during the encore. Derek Miller’s level of madness could have matched that of Alexis were he not constrained by his guitar. The crowd was raucous as ever, even stealing the hat of one of the other photographers (not cool, crowd) but was otherwise very well behaved despite their outpouring of blood (more on that in a bit), sweat and emotion. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the Sleigh Bells portion of the evening as I more wanted to see CSS, but they definitely won me over almost instantly.
After the show, Alexis hung out at the merch table signing autographs, taking pictures and chatting it up with the fans. I didn’t get a chance to take a picture with her, but I did get a chance to give her a high five before she made her way up to the defacto backstage area upstairs, but a high five was all I really wanted anyway.
As the crowd dispersed, it became clear that someone or something had been horribly injured, with two massive pools of blood on the venue floor and a trail of bloody footprints throughout, but nobody really knew who or what it was from. It was almost ridiculous to the point of us wondering if someone had brought some fake blood to play a joke. Later on, we saw the photographer again whose hat had been squandered from him, proudly wearing it atop his head. As it turns out, the young lady who stole his hat was also the one responsible for the blood, presumably the victim of a broken nose. While we hope she’s OK and wasn’t seriously hurt in the end, don’t steal people’s things, because karma is a bitch, y’all.
Check out a few more pics on flickr if the spirit moves you.
