Sleigh Bells and AraabMuzik at the Pageant: The View From the Mosh Pit [PHOTOS]

By Kiernan Maletsky Mon., Oct. 29 2012 at 2:10 PM

Categories: Last Night, Show Recaps

All photos by Kiernan Maletsky, unless otherwise noted.

Yep, that's right, there was a mosh pit at the Pageant last night during the Sleigh Bells concert. To be fair: maybe the most sedate mosh pit I've ever seen. But I'd like to think at least one person left with bruises and I know I went home covered in a diverse sweat cocktail -- including some from Volcanoes' Eric Peters, who generally took better photos with his iPhone than I did with my point-and-shoot. Decide for yourself:

Photo by Eric Peters

There really shouldn't have been a mosh pit at the Sleigh Bells/AraabMuzik show. Sleigh Bells is a band with a very broad appeal at this point; broad enough that it is playing the Pageant. That usually means too much wariness between strangers for much communal dancing. And that's to say nothing of the music itself -- for all the muscular posturing of Sleigh Bells, it is dance beats and a profound love of thirty year old, stadium-sized riffs. But the show is more fun than the music, mostly to the credit of Alexis Krauss, who fronts this thing like she's having a seizure, grinning, flailing and generally commanding the room so effectively she could sign everyone there up for a cult right on the spot. The light show matched; I stopped caring about using my flash halfway through when I realized no one would possibly notice.