MUSIC

Warehouse Live presents Sleigh Bells and CSS.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Sleigh Bells  (pictured) is the musical collaboration of Derek E. Miller (songwriter, guitarist, producer) and Alexis Krauss (vocalist, lyricist). The two met and formed in 2008, when Miller was waiting tables on Alexis and her mother at a neighborhood Brazilian restaurant. When Miller mentioned that he was looking for a female vocalist for a new musical project, Krauss’s mother immediately volunteered her daughter.

Sleigh Bells’ unique sound is likely the result of Miller and Krauss’s contrasting musical backgrounds; Miller was formerly the guitarist for the post-hardcore band Poison the Well and Krauss was a member of the teen pop group RubyBlue as a teenager. After steadily gaining popularity throughout 2009, Sleigh Bells signed to M.I.A.'s label N.E.E.T. in Spring 2010. On May 11th 2010 Sleigh Bells released their debut full-length album entitled Treats.

The album’s immediate popularity and the band’s reputation as an energetic live act have helped solidify the duo’s widespread popularity. Amidst blown-out drum beats, fuzzed guitars and synth-pop sensibilities, Krauss balances each song with a voice that is both forceful and elegant. After playing Pitchfork’s summer music festival, Sleigh Bells set out on their North American tour in July 2010.

Cansei de Ser Sexy (commonly known as CSS)  is a band from São Paulo, Brazil, formed in 2003. The band name is Portuguese for “Tired of Being Sexy” (taken from something Beyonce once commented to the press: “I am tired of being sexy”). The members are: Lovefoxxx (vocals), Adriano Cintra (drums, guitar, vocals and production), Luiza Sa (guitar, drums and keys), Ana Rezende (guitar and harmonica), Iracema Trevisan (bass) and Carolina Parra (guitar and drums).

In an interview, guitarist/harmonica player Ana Rezende explains the band's name: "[...] we heard that Beyoncé had said that she was really tired of being sexy, which is a really retarded thing to say. It's like saying, "Oh, I'm tired of being rich." So "tired of being sexy" in Portuguese is cansei de ser sexy, so we put it on the flyer to promote the show that we were playing and we kind of got stuck with that name. It was just the stupidest name that we could have ever come up with, but it's funny and I love it. But sometimes people think that we're serious and we're tired of being recognized for our bodies or something like that, and it's nothing like that at all.." CSS owes a lot of its success to word-of-mouth promotion on the internet, starting with the Trama Virtual website, a kind of Brazilian MySpace.

 A live performance in 2004 at Tim Festival on the same stage as 2 Many DJs and Kraftwerk increased their fanbase. In 2005, they signed with trama virtual and in October of the same year their first album was released in Brazil. At the beginning of 2006, CSS signed with Sub Pop to release their first international album and in July they made a thirty-gig tour through USA and Canada along with DJ Diplo and Bonde do Role. The live performance CSS offers is uniquely energetic and entertaining. Lovefoxxx dodges among her bandmates and involves the audience in virtually every song. Sá, Cintra, and Parra switch instruments so often it's easy to forget where they started.

Tours of the US and Europe with Ladytron and Basement Jaxx in 2006 were followed by gigs in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In 2007 18 year old student and Apple fan Nick Haley created a home made iPod Touch commercial by piecing together various clips found at apple.com and adding the fast paced and catchy CSS song "Music is My Hot Hot Sex" as the soundtrack. After uploading the home made commercial to YouTube Haley was contacted by Apple agency TBWA/Chiat/Day who was allowed to create a TV commercial based on his original spot, claiming instant fame for the CSS tune as well as for the user generated commercial.