Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

THE REVIEW

Here they are again, quietly and steadily, the two Canadians Crystal Castles, only 24 months after that lustful mess of ultra-kitsch, glitchy, lo-fi electronics imbued with 8-bit sounds enough to make the most nostalgic nerds bounce, which was their self-titled debut. It was already clear from the first record that they weren't exactly the nicest folks, brilliant yes, hallucinatory as well, but certainly dense with rather "tense" atmospheres. At this point, they leave us no room for doubt by putting on the cover a dark-faced girl standing in front of her possibly deceased parents' gravestones and naming this second work "Crystal Castles," just like the previous one.

However, aside from appearances, it’s in the juicy heart of the album that you realize many things have changed in these two years. First of all, those rough and disorienting sounds from the Commodore 64 or NES as one might say, have almost completely disappeared: a sore point for those who, like me, had madly appreciated the Toronto duo's debut. Only a few succulent samples remain in the two most danceable tracks on the album: “Intimate,” a fat and large disco tank, beeping, farting, and polluting, a relentless tour de force for the synapses connecting the brain to the butt. And "Baptism" a nasty, dreamy, and slightly bewildering hyperballad, very much a throwback to one of their old pieces ("Courtship Dating," used by MTV to advertise the series Skins).
The rest, which is most of the album anyway, on the other hand, attempts innovative solutions. Crystal Castles focus everything on a dark and frightening electronics that, while almost danceable, with so much darkness "at stake," will hardly find space in DJ sets and the most colorful parties. For example, do you remember "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" by 4hero (that dance track where you could hear the voice of a policeman warning Mr. Kirk that his son had died because he had taken drugs during a merry, wild night)? A masterful example is "Year of Silence," a dark remix of a super cheerful Sigur Rós track ("Inní mér syngur vitleysingur") in which Jónsi Birgisson's angelic voice turns into a creepy lullaby of a zombie mother rocking her pet. What about the industrial, bouncing and enveloping beats, adorned with dream-pop vocals (always lo-fi and incomprehensible, coming from the depths of a well) of "Empathy" and "Fainting Spells"? And again, between anguished screams on an amphetamine base ("Doe Deer"), the oppressive lines of "Birds" from another planet, slow and sexy headbanging techno ("Vietnam"), Crystal Castles also find time to embrace trends to discover the wobbly, loose, and drunken sounds of so-called hypnagogic pop, but they rumple it with a dark wave key so much that I had to invent a neologism: Hypnagogic Pop (NME is nothing to me... okay, shoot me).

And after you’ve gulped down this big slimy cauldron, you wonder "what the heck did I just listen to?". Indeed, on a first listen it’s hard to remember any particular track. As I said before, much of the immediacy from the pieces that were has been lost, but it must be said that what remains is somewhat akin to the disgusting taste of nicotine that sits in your mouth after smoking a cigarette: it’s disgusting and almost makes you regret having that horrible habit, but inevitably, as soon as it goes away you feel like trying it again. So, the Crystal Castles of 2010, are like that: smoky, unpredictable, disturbing and harmful. Reviewing the first album I had said they could almost be compared to great, much noisier electro bands (Daft Punk, Justice, etc.). I was totally wrong. Crystal Castles were aiming for a very different, sly, mysterious, slippery… well, who knows.
In short, like the vast majority of artists that are offspring of these '00s, it’s not clear where they are heading. But, as long as they do it so well, we’re fine with it this way.