Crystal Castles - Album 1
Posted by Guest Writer on Mon, 01 Dec 2008.
Alice Glass - Vocals
Ethan Kath - Everything!
Toronto duo Crystal Castles, named after the Crystal Castle from She-Ra: Princess of Power apparently (old cartoon series) feature the talents of multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass formed in December 2003. They are an electro synth-pop random marmite band who’s musical style has been described as having "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", and what I mean by marmite is you either love them or you hate them.
Their debut album was released earlier this year which got NME magazine very excited as the writers are practically in love with Alice Glass (the vocalist) who is currently the top spot of the magazines cool list. The band are known for their unforgettable gigs and Alice’s rather comical onstage “dancing”. When they played at Reading and Leeds festival they got told to leave because her dancing got out of control and she ended up on the stage rigging. This apparently, is a very bad thing.
But anyway, their album is awesome, in my eyes. If you like bands like The Teenagers, Pendulum or Hadouken, I’m sure you’ll like these guys too. They write creative and powerful lyrics which demonstrates the feeling they have. The collection of songs show heartache and despair and the way they are worded is phenomenal. If you happened to be a friend on their Myspace profile, then few of the songs at the start of the album will be very familiar, namely Alice Practice, something of an accidental hit latched onto by an “on the ball” record company. The song “Crimewave” follows in a very similar fashion, with “Air War” being the last of the familiar. “1991” and “Knights” take on a bit more fo a darker approach, a nice counter point to the start of the album.
One last word: sinful-innocence.
By Wombat