So badass, they named themselves after Christmas imagery.
It’s time to slip you some notes under the desk that the teacher won’t read out loud in front of the class. 
We’re giving DJ Scratchy one last spin of the retail turntable to reel off another earworm that has the consumer masses shopping until they drop. Welcome to the final installment of our June reboot of Mecca Muzak Mondays! And since we just passed the halfway mark to that biggest of all shopping holidays, today we’re gonna deck the halls with a little Sleigh Bells!
No…. not real sleigh bells. Even at Mecca it’s too early for that shit. That just happens to be the name of the duo that’s providing us with this week’s featured tune.
Calm down, ES. You can put the shotgun away…
Sleigh Bells is a….. well, whoever wrote their Wikipedia entry apparently decided they best fit the well known musical genre called “noise pop.” Yes, that’s almost as comically ridiculous as melodic death metal…. another musical category that actually exists, much to my amusement. If noise pop is actually a thing, I can’t believe it wouldn’t be used to describe The Flying Lizards rather than a band like Sleigh Bells that produces music that is wholesome enough to be played at Meccas across the nation…
Fuck that wholesome shit with a noise pop cassette!
Oh no…. the Sleigh Bells song that echos through the hallowed halls of you local big box store is anything but cheery mood setting music. “Rill Rill,” from their 2009 self-titled debut EP, is a rather dark song with an even darker video…. but it was still catchy enough to get me to notice it after about the 10th time I heard it play while at work…
Six six six? Cut ’em in the bathroom? How in the heck did this song make the muzak playlist!?!? Maybe the popularity it got by being featured in an iPhone commercial a few years ago helped. This might be something you’d expect to hear blasting out of the speakers if you dared to walk into one of those edgier stores in the mall that are lit about as well as a New York City back alley and are staffed by people with hair colors that start with P who are unable to pass through a metal detector naked. But at your local Mecca?
Geez, I hope this doesn’t get played on Black Friday.
One obscure song deserves another. This one blatantly rips off samples a 70’s Funkadelic song called “Can You Get To That.” We asked George Clinton what he thought about his music being “borrowed” to make noise pop…
Bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yay!
I hope you enjoyed this month’s brief foray back into Mecca muzak! Come back next Monday as we reopen the Dusty Vinyl Archive for business once again…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
I know why I never hopped over to apple… think I stay with windows… they have better muzak… apart from lenkas everything at once LOL
Well, Apple had the Beatles…. oh wait, that’s a different Apple!
Oh my…had the volume inadvertently turned all the way and the opening POP woke me up without a drop of coffee. Interesting tune, but not my favorite. Thanks for sharing the wake up call this morning. 😇
Think of all the money you can save on coffee if you just play this every morning! All the alertness, and none of the jitters!
All my coffee money would go to Ibuprofen though so probably no money would be saved.
This is my new favorite song. I love the blood on the old fashioned landline phone…
The old style phone was so cool. I fucking hate that you hear “landline phone” more often than you hear “cell phone” now, because a “phone” is just assumed to be a cell phone. Alexander Graham Bell must be rolling over in his grave…
LMAO!! too funny! Oh, couldn’t open the video…oh well! 😦 maybe next time!
They call it “voice” here… order internet, cable and voice in a bundle! Um, call it a telephone and we’ll talk…
That’s just what the cable company calls it… and what do they know other how to take my money.
Blood suckers!
Hmm… never heard this one before. On the surface, it seems like a cute little song, until you see that video, and listen to the words! haha … well, speaking of hearing tunes over the retail Muzak speakers, I have a question. You seem to know a lot of obscure songs, and there’s one I only have heard over the grocery store speakers. I wonder if you have heard a song that has the word ‘okay’ dragged out into a long haunting phrase? It’s been bugging me forever to know what it is, because I like it. Sorry, not much of a clue! 🙂
That doesn’t ring a bell. Most of the weird/obscure songs I’ve learned from the PA at work I was able to find by jotting down a few lyrics and then looking them up when I got home. If you hear that song again, and it has any lyrics other than the “okay”, try getting some of the words to look it up. And if you do find out what it is, let me know because I’m curious!
That’s okay! haha … If I ever hear it again I’ll try to understand some more of the words. I have looked up every combination of the word in songs I can think of, and as you say, none of them ring a bell! 🙂
I’ve heard noisier pop. I guess that chap in the car has strummed his last… or maybe not, since he seems to be still alive. In the middle of the desert.
Good song, though 🙂
I was expecting her to run him over when she bothered to turn back around. Then again, maybe it’s more cruel to let him suffer in the desert with a head wound….
I have not been in a retail store — other than the grocery or pharmacy — in a really long time. But tomorrow, we will get full muzak because we are getting the house fogged for bugs and we have to take the dogs and leave the house for a couple of hours. So us and the dawgz will be off in Muzak Land. Imagine what we might hear!
You will hear all kinds of stuff you probably hadn’t hear before because muzak has come a long way from what it was when I was a kid! No more moldy oldies and bad classical compositions from out of work lounge pianists. You will hear some really weird stuff like this song…
Hmm……I’m passing on both of these – although the girl singer in the first one gets a point for “most interesting jewelry accessory” with the “bullet necklace”………….eeek!
Pam
I think Rambo first made that kind of necklace famous. I’ll bet she wouldn’t have any trouble out of her boyfriend…
Oh I think we know who’s in charge of that relationship!