Album Review: Crystal Castles

Cross-posted on akuhei bakery

I guess I was wrong. Despite my initial reservations, Toronto-based duo Crystal Castles‘ glitchy, weird sound has stretched out to a full-length album. And it’s pretty great, too. Read on!

Crystal Castles - Self-titled
Last Gang Records

Crystal Castles are, unfortunately, not named after the old Atari game, but rather, a location from the old She-Ra cartoon. It’s unfortunate since

A - Atari games have a lot more old-school cool than crappy He-Man knock-offs

and B - Talking about the bleepy, primitively electronic noises that passed as music in retro games would have provided the perfect segue into talking about Crystal Castles’ own brand of bleepy, primitively electronic noises.

The self-titled album opens with “Untrust Us” which, with it’s heavily-treated vocals courtesy of singer Alice Glass, and washes of plinky-plonky Nintendo-synths from multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath, is probably the best opening track you can hope to get. Because, if you like it, you’re sure to continue; however, if you absolutely hate it, you’ll rip the CD out straight away, and sell it on eBay.

And it’s good to get those haters out of the way before “Alice Practice” which they would despise; in fact, I hated it when I first heard it. Mainly because it sounds like Alice is desperately shouting over the sounds of someone playing Space Invaders. Once again, if you liked the sound of that, you’ll probably like the rest of the album; however if you didn’t, stick with it anyway, since the thrash-electro doesn’t return until “XXZXCUZX Me” (which is under two minutes) and “Love And Caring” (which is only slightly over).

The rest of the album sticks with the “weirdly dark, somewhat-ambient-but-still-upbeat, low-fi sound” I described in my initial post, one insanely catchy songs like “Crimewave”, which become less weirdly dark on second single “Air War”, hopefully future single “Courtship Date”, the slightly-overlong instrumental “Magic Spells”, and the short-but-sweet “Good Times”.

We also get a slice perfect dark-pop in “Vanished”, with sampled vocals from Aussie band Van She recalling Cut Copy. This is where things go slightly off, as the band sort of run out of ideas. While most of the songs on the album up to this point hadn’t deviated from the glitch-electronic template, sometimes using incredibly-similar sounding drum loops, I sort of liked that; it had a Kraftwerk quality, and tied the whole album together.

Tracks 11 onwards are all rather throwaway, at least, after you’ve heard the first ten tracks. “Knights” is another one that sounds like the boss battle music from some old Atari game; “Love And Caring” is basically a re-hash of “Alice Practice”; while as “Through The Hosiery”, “Reckless” and “Black Panther” sound just like the rest of the album (although the latter does up the tempo a bit). Album closer “Tell Me What To Swallow”, despite the porny-sounding title, is a rather sweet, possibly acoustic little love ballad, with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”-style echo effects on Alice’s vocals. Which is a perfect end to a not-so-perfect album.

While not exactly a 5 star record, I would highly recommend Crystal Castles’ debut to anyone who is intrigued by what they’ve read here, or any songs they’ve heard around the place, as it is genuinely fresh and interesting (unless you listen to glitch music, which I can’t, since I find it, well, unlistenable) and pretty darn danceable. I’m looking forward to seeing how they’ll develop their sound, unless, and I’ve got a bad feeling they might, CC turn out to be another one of those bands (such as Test Icicles, or label mates Death From Above 1979), who make an enjoyabley original debut with a lot of promise, only to split up soon after.

Not that I can see Alice Glass doing a Dev Hynes style folk album…

Download “Alice Practice”
Download “Courtship Date”

Crystal Castles on MySpace
Crystal Castles remixes on MySpace