paul lester hearts these darlings of the electronic underground, whose 'songs' sound like a load of gameboys going off all at once in your brain.
hometown: toronto, canada.
the lineup: ethan fawn (multi-instrumentalist), alice glass (vocals).
the background: this is more like it. this is the best new band since the last one we really (new) raved about, which would be, ooh, mgmt three weeks ago. this is like having the inside of your head syringed clean after yesterday's faux-soul rot. we like this one a lot because - call us old-fashioned - on one song, crimewave, they sound like an android ian curtis intoning blankly over kraftwerk at their most synthetic and on another, alice practice, like rioting pac-men in an atari computer factory as the blair witch shrieks in the distance. clearly kraftwerk at their least synthetic is a contradiction in terms and obviously computer factory workers tend not to riot (neither do pac-men), but you know what we mean.
naming themselves either after an early-80s atari arcade game based on, funnily enough, pac-man or the princess of power's fortress in the sky from mattel's he-man/she-ra toy franchise (whichever, these kids like kids' stuff), crystal castles' digital violence and analogue vandalism is half way between warp at their most extreme and alec empire's digital hardcore, er, empire. With over a million profile views on myspace, they're already a big noise - and it is a big noise, an intimidating electronic squall of squeals and shrill squeaks and squawks that sounds like a load of gameboys going off at once in your brain. they've been described as "the most exciting and original band in the world right now" and "8-bit terror". and fawn, formerly of well-respected country-rock combo *%&%*%&%*%&, has already earned a reputation as a remixer for Klaxons and bloc party while glass is still recovering from her stint with fetus fatale.
but it's their own "songs" (term used advisedly) that have made them the darlings of the electronic underground, via free downloads on music blogs. they arrived at their highly original sound by placing atari 5200 sound-chips inside a keyboard. they're influenced by the two greatest rock'n'roll bands in history (the stooges and joy division, folks) and inspired by everything from zaccharias janssen, the inventor of the microscope, and "blank looks on girls". their ambition is "to write a song that can make the entire world vomit in unison" and to get psyched up for their live performances they "start fights with the opening bands and push old ladies into cars". their new single air war, the follow-up to cult smash crimewave and the alice practice ep, is outselling everything this week bar the most overrated rock'n'roll band in history (the clear stripes, folks), and they're supporting klaxons and justice at brixton academy tonight. expect mass crowd surges, metal barriers destroyed, blinding strobes, men with stockings over their faces, punishing electronics, and screeching vocals. should be a good gig.
the buzz: "ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional gameboy glitches and bruising drum bombast pierce the skull with sheer shrill force, burrowing deep into the brain like a fever."
the truth: it's brutal, it's violent... it's a pleasure.
most likely to: make you feel unsteady.
least likely to: appeal to fans of the hold steady.
file next to: atari teenage riot, max tundra, kid 606, squarepusher.
what to buy: air war is released by trouble (yes it is) on december 17. their album comes out on last gang in february 2008.
ever since ethan kath secretly recorded fellow torontan and punk vocalist alice glass on a soundcheck, the partnership has been setting the pace for electro-pop. while crystal castles is allegedly a reference to he-man’s estranged twin sister she-ra, kath’s electronic engineering sounds a lot more like the 1983 atari game of the same name. 8-bit sounds bubble up everywhere around house beats and glass’ processed vocal antagonism on their debut self-titled lp (circa 2008). breakout single “alice practice” (which features those original stolen vocals) sounds like a crack addict arguing with a malfunctioning arcade game. last summer saw the release of the long-awaited sophomore album from cc (also self-titled), and a change from video-game themes to haunted compositions, building on layers of spectral reverb, pitch-shifted laudanum vocals, and ominous bass-synth runners. the exemplary track “violent dreams” imagines a kind of gothic possession story with dark clouds of bass undergirding stalking organ notes and chopped intonations including nearly subliminal ghost moans. crystal castles’ major conceit may be how little glass’ lyrics contribute to their songs overall impact. more of a visual foil to kath’s dark electronic wizardry, she nevertheless makes the live show worth seeing. while kath hides behind his bangs and a cul-de-sac of boards and processors, glass is out front hot-footing like a native american in the midst of mescaline reveries. notice to those in the crowd who manage to get up front, be prepared to play catch because this lady likes to stage-dive her own shows.
in 2008, the track “air war” by crystal castles was used in toshiba commercial “time sculpture”to promote toshiba's high-definition television upscaling technology.
the piece, which comprised a collection of interacting loops sequenced into a moving shot, was created in collaboration with advertising agency grey london, based on a video art proposal by director mitch stratten. time sculpture holds the world record for the greatest number of moving image cameras used in a single shot.
time sculpture was directed by mitch stratten and the shoot was handled by production company hungry man with post-production completed by the mill in london.
i go to myspace of crystal castles and what i find there:
"DOE DEER 12” vinyl: 500 COPIES.APRIL 17, 2010.1 TRACK FROM THE NEW ALBUM AND 3 UNRELEASED FROM 2004."
complete with a cover that could drive even a shy, reserved girl like me crazy.
because the crystal castles are the necessary evil in the life of any overgrown teenager, coming of age in the midst of the technological age and finding in this duo all the nihilism of a historical period too neurotic for warm hearts and thinking heads; the right compromise between a hypnotic 1980s video game, softcore porn and the melancholy we lost along the way.
“doe deer” is the first taste of crystal castles' second album, and i assure you i can't get it out of the player; a track as short as it is violent i haven't heard since 1997. in a little over a minute and a half i find all the anger i had lost, managing to channel it into a single track. fast as lightning is like scratching the teacher's blackboard and not having the strength to plug your ears, a necessary noise.
doe deer's 12” vinyl is already a fetish to absolutely own and consume, but i already know it will be impossible to get it.
instead, crystal castles' second album will be released on june 7 and here i take the liberty of pointing out the resounding lack of originality of the duo, who merely titled the new album exactly like the first: crystal castles.
but little matter.
the next step for crystal castles will be to conquer the widest slice of the audience you can have for a party-animal band. You will hear more about them. because they are that novelty you don't expect, that bombshell ready to burst when menno expect it, destroying everything within range.
ethan kath and the beautiful alice glass are an explosion of energy, hard and pure. powerful as a kick in the gums they are ready to make you dance next april 28 in milan, waiting as soon as possible for the release of “crystal castles.”
crystal castles remixed numerous groups including liars, goodbooks, the whip and most notably klaxons, adding their digital reverb to ‘atlantis to interzone’
"when we formed we wanted to piss people off," ethan told us backstage on the tour, "we thought we were making such weird music that no-one would ever like it".
last sunday in newcastle he was proved wrong again.
crystal castles destroy newcastle on the topman nme new noise tour, which saw support from friendly fires, team waterpolo and white lies.
topman nme new noise tour headliners crystal castles, whose movements have been shrouded in rumours since they arrived on our radar two years ago. stories have circulated that ethan is on the run from police, and that they were in an embarrassing glam rock band for several years.
crystal castles used their topman new noise tour set to give new track ‘exoskeleton’ a live outing. find out how the tour went down in this week’s nme magazine.
crystal castles have divided opinion on nme.com. one user thinks they sound "like the worst soundtrack for the worst video game ever" while another remarked that their album was "a highly original piece of work with fantastic tracks to back up the expansive sound". we gave it 8/10, and anyone who has witnessed their live show will testify to their genius.
nme cover stars crystal castles backstage on the topman nme new noise tour 2008 in newcastle last sunday (may 11). the band had to cancel some of their tour dates in march after alice broke her ribs in a car accident, but they were back on top form this week.
alice glass of crystal castles. she spent most of the gig writhing across the heads of the audience or being pulled around by the security who just couldnt work out what to do with her. this is a moment of calm, frozen by the strobes she has either side of the stage.
the differences in crystal castles IIare subtle, but the key advance made is one of generosity.
if crystal castles’s self-titled debut made it sound like pac-man was only half his then-nearly 28 years and wore down listener resistance by more or less reiterating their limited bleeps-n’-loops musical apparatus over a punishing 16 tracks, their follow-up is sophomoric only in the sense that it, too, is self-obsessedly self-titled. otherwise, the album is a pretty significant leap forward for the redolent electronic punk duo-cum-perpetual look at this fucking hipster fodder. they’ve moved on from huffing paint thinner to farting in your mouth while you are sleeping. the differences are subtle, but the key advance made is one of generosity.
which is not to say that they’ve given themselves a complete overhaul. though the atari blips are largely missing this time around, the retroactive (retro-passive?) synthetic sensualism and 13th-hour, fourth meal-fueled stamina are in full fettle. it’s just that this time they’re not juggling two game controllers at once. they’re too busy, judging by their softened song titles, gazing into the “celestica” skies, spending one “year of silence,” baptizing “doe deer,” offering “empathy” to those “not in love,” battling “suffocation” and “fainting spells,” and getting a “pap smear” in “vietnam.”
that last track marks one of the strongest and best departures from their earlier efforts; it’s a widescreen, temperamental, high-eq journey into the sonic battleground, with a bassline that whirs like helicopter blades, tinkling synthesizer lines sprouting like lamentations, and chopping on alice glass’s vocals that, for once, suggests something more ominous than mere effect. other highlights in gravitas include: “violent dreams,” whose airy michael mann atmospherics suggest alan braxe and fred falke’s ’80s revivalism; “not in love,” which bittersweetly refuses to resolve the tension in its progressions, storing heartbreak in those chord clusters like squirrels hoard nuts; and “year of silence,” with reverberating kicks, call-and-response vocal lines, and an Italo-chic synth countermelody straight out of legowelt’s “congo zombie,” pure grindhouse sophistication.
but with that sophistication comes a tradeoff. for as irritating and limited as their first album was in stretches, its driving intensity was undeniable. the whirring effects in “1991” were like every sound effect from williams’s “black knight” consolecompressed into two incredibly jacked-up minutes. at its worst moments, the album still gave off the impression of trying to dance under duress. there was a through line of strain just waiting for synthesis. in contrast, the superior but occasionally milquetoastcrystal castles: book twoinadvertently underscores the pitfalls of maturity and liberation.
there are only a few different types of songs on crystal castles’ intermittently exciting self-titled debut. for fun, and in honor of the fact that the band’s unique sound is derived from a synthesizer into which they installed an atari 5200 chip, let’s classify these song types with names that relate to some of modern teenagers’ favorite timewasters: wii, xbox, and huffing paint thinner.
songs in the key of wii are chiefly defined by being stupid, simplistic, and incredibly fun. tracks like “1991” and “black panther” cruise by quickly with minimal fuss and are pretty much exactly what you might want or expect from a band that actually tries to sound like a video game. there are a lot of ping-ponging keyboard melodies and stray laser beam noises, and lead singer alice glass’s vocals are often reduced to atmospheric background mumbles. though this shtick is kind of juvenile, it’s also winning.
songs belonging to the second category, like the stellar opener “untrust us” and “magic spells,” are much more sophisticated, and have conceptual underpinnings more complicated than “wave ‘em like you just don’t care.” they also tend to seem a little more expensive. nevertheless, this platform lacks a killer app; although these tracks are accomplished, the best of the lot, “vanished,” is essentially an excellent remix of the (better) song “sex city” by australian nü-wavers van she. and “magic spells,” for all the woozy depth of its production, is about three minutes too long.
it’s difficult to say whether or not this album would be much better had the band limited themselves to just these two styles. such a record might tend toward the soporific, whereas this one simply makes several loud, flow-disrupting mistakes. remember, kids, huffing paint thinner is always a bad idea. songs in this category make one nostalgic for the soothing sounds of atari teenage riot, whose name presaged crystal castles’ most zeitgeist-busting moments more than a decade ago. Imagine a video game console exploding in the face of a very peevish girl-punk at a happy hardcore party and you’re on the right track. granting that “alice practice” and “xxzxcuzx me” are perfect specimens of this kind of song, defined by as-always shiny production and audio shrapnel for days, they’re still quite irritating and certainly not good for one’s brain cells—even if you’re the type who enjoys the ranty screams of lead singers who cannot, strictly, sing.
where the rest of the album trades in cheap-sounding and eccentric but still rather charming variations on punky dance-pop, crystal castles’ most rockist moments seem to wish to appear arty by being as annoying as possible. it’s a tricky maneuver, and the fact that the group doesn’t quite pull it off screws up the coherence of this otherwise strong record, but that doesn’t make them any less promising.
(alice glass of crystal castles on stage in london, 2009. photograph: rachel bevis/rex)
the 8-bit electro-punk hipsters may no longer tour in a converted riot van with stab-proof wheels, but they're still on the defensive.
here's something you won't read every day: ethan kath from crystal castles is an extremely nice chap. if you've ever read anything about the world's new favourite toronto-born electro duo, kath is always – but always – presented as a grumpy, uncommunicative, passive-aggressive arse.
if "new rave" brought them to our attention, crystal castles have long since outlasted it. masters of what has become known as 8-bit, or chiptune,crystal castles build brilliant records from sounds you might find down the back of a games console. to date, nearly 8 million have watched five different crystal castles videos on youtube; this is a band so of the moment they've been on the soundtrack to skins more often than a squeaking bedspring. they are this generation's chemical brother and sister.
anyway, there's nothing even slightly grumpy or uncommunicative about the 28-year-old in a black hoodie and skinny jeans i meet in the banana-yellow offices of a 1,000-capacity nightclub in an unattractive suburb of milan. he apologises for his hair being odd lengths (apparently castles screamer alice glass cuts it when he's not looking). he tells me about the livestock and lack of windows on his grandfather's farm in calabria (the southern-most "toe" in the Italian "boot"). he tells me about the band's old van (a decommissioned riot squad vehicle with "stab-proof" tyres) and how he had to get rid of his first drummer when the tub-thumper's ruinous liking for cocaine derailed a huge show in tokyo. he tells me about how many links to illegal downloads of his new record there are on twitter. he tells me about how those links all lead to a version of the album that includes the wrong edit of future single, celestica. he has a lot to say for himself, all of it interesting, and each story is delivered with the same engaging, garrulous enthusiasm. when he offers to nip out and chase up glass – she's having a shower, having just woken up at 6.30pm – i think to myself what a pleasure it is to meet him.
so glass appears, hair still wet, beaming smile, couldn't be more charming, and we sit down for the interview. then something sort of hilarious happens. ethan kath slips into character and becomes "ethan kath out of crystal castles", someone who is, oh dear, quite capable of being a grumpy, uncommunicative, passive-aggressive arse.
i lob an easy one at him to start. tell me about the brain, i say, referring to the battered flight-case full of wounded, half-dead keyboards and old mobile phones that, apparently, provide a lot of the noise and vocal samples that the band use on stage.
"there's no such thing," - he replies with a face like a four-year-old who's just been denied a lollipop. and we're off! "maybe the crew call it that," he says, "but I don't. I'm not emotionally attached to any gear."
so if it all got burnt you wouldn't care?
"there are music shops in every city in the world," offers the man who has built a (well-deserved) mythology on the uniqueness of his sounds and is famous for his hatred of preset technology. "It's no big deal."
in an attempt to teasefriendly ethan back out of the woodwork i go for the least contentious question imaginable.
do your fans react differently in different parts of the world, i smile?
"no," he says, staring. "everywhere hates us the same." except, of course, they don't. outside this venue there are hundreds of young (and not-so-young) fans gathered hours before the doors open, and that's because crystal castles' new album – called, like their first, crystal castles – is a wonderful record that rides the noise/pop knife edge as well as anyone in the world. kath is a songwriter and producer of rare talent, someone who can write songs like celestica or year of silence that are so brilliantly melodic, so grippingly immediate, so joyously pop, that were they on the new kylie minogue album you would throw your hat into the air with the slightly edgy electro pleasure of it all. but he can also write doe deer or birds, pieces that are furious, experimental and abrasive. i am made of chalk sounds like he's shredded a vhs copy of infamous video-nasty i spit on your grave and randomly stuck the bits back together with home-made adhesive. it is both brilliant and terrible. kath is taking chances, and we are lucky to have him. he may, in fact, be the planet's funniest hipster. i certainly found him highly entertaining, i just didn't see the point of the sudden grump attack.
when kath and glass talk about how they came together as crystal castles in the summer of 2005 the room actually comes alive.
"shewas getting high all summer," kath laughs. "i found her on the street; she was higher than anyone i've ever seen in my life."
it's worth pointing out that, at the time, he was in a band with a heroin addict. as a child glass had been a real loner: someone who sat in the corner of her room and wrote "cheesy" poetry, who ran away from home at 14. when she began recording with kath she was just 17, had shaved off half of her hair and completed her look with a filthy eye-patch.
"this punk guy had the infection first," she smiles. "he then went around dabbing his germ-stained finger in everyone else's eye. i had it for three months."
kathsays she was so high that when he wanted to talk to her about the songs they'd recorded together glass would just say, "call me!" and make the phone-to-the-ear movement despite the fact that neither of them had a phone. they still don't, apparently. glass was living with a squeegee merchant called rosa who had a house in downtown toronto and split the rent between 20 people at $100 a month.
"there were a lot of drug punks there," she says. "they'd do really shitty things like heat up metal coat hangers and brand their skulls … "
it seems like everything's back on course, so i mention that what i really like about the record is how it goes noisy one, pop one, noisy one, pop one. that's great sequencing! silence. i move my feet to allow a huge ball of tumbleweed to blow past.
"maybe," says glass, eventually.
"i don't hear them as noise or pop," kath says. "all I hear is one bleak feeling that lasts an hour."
indeed. but year of silence is a big, bright brilliant pop song, i say. it doesn't sound particularly "bleak". interestingly, this may be the exact point where the ghost-like presence of nice ethan rises up from his mortal frame and boards a transatlantic flight back to toronto.
"that's actually insulting," he groans. "that's the opposite of what i was going for. i'm not trying to write pop songs at all. year of silence was something i imagined hearing at some shitty, small goth club."
the duo are playing all over europe on a pre-release tour for the new album, which is coming out on the same label snow patrol are signed to. they've played an nme tour sponsored by topman and they're appearing at the radio 1 big weekend. are these really the decisions of an unambitious band?
"yeah," mutters glass.
"of course," says kath. "because we have no ambition, yet we are in this position. there are 3,000 bands that deserve this more than we do."
no there aren't.
"you don't need ambition to play a show," says glass. "there's not a lot of effort needed … "
two hours later and the venue's full to bursting with goths, metalheads, indie kids, ravers and whatever the italian equivalent of mainstream, gig-happy teens are called. crystal castles' live show is a masterpiece of dark beauty. lit by a pair of brutal strobes they stick to the big-room tunes. glass twists and dives and crawls along the stage hugging a loose strobe to her belly. she is utterly captivating.
kath stands to her right, behind what looks like it might be the brain (except, of course, that doesn't exist), alternately punching out notes and beats, then strapping on a guitar. crystal castles are awesomely concise and effective, a rolling noise that will destroy all competition at any festival this summer.
a couple of days later i email kath to find out if his rather taciturn interview persona is actually all part of some larger crystal castles gameplan. a self-preservation technique perhaps? a perfectly charming email pings back within the hour.
"there is no other person," he writes. "we're quite shy."
