"a vortex of deafening pain without a safety net"

This is the band Crystal Castles.

The first I ever heard of them was when I opened Spin magazine a little over a year ago and saw this photo splashed across their featured article.

"Cool," I thought.

"How is she smoking through a stocking?" I thought next.

I read the article. The band is comprised of these two members alone: Alice Glass, the 20 year old horror hipster eye candy vocalist and Ethan Kath, the 28 year older dirty bearded mastermind.

I was intrigued by the photos and the electronic experimental lo-fi noise style of music I was reading about. I searched them and downloaded some tracks.

This is what I discovered.


It was slightly terrifying. But it also felt... good.

BACKSTORY:
I am a devoted rock music minion and proud to be one. And I don't need lyrics. I need sounds, beats, pulses, an audible hypnosis. I need to bang my head.
Ever since I discovered distortion pedals when I was 14, my life changed. I found that there was a very large hole in my heart that was hungry and craving something jagged, fiery and LOUD. I deeply desired mind-crushing, sternum quaking rock music. But I was having troubling finding the flavor that was right for me. Queens of the Stone Age built the foundation of my robotic machine gun fire rock music skeleton. The Misfits, the only punk band I actually love, also satisfied the burst of violent energy that sometimes need satiating (only Static Age really).
Then, in college, I found Death From Above 1979, a band so pure in purpose that I thought God shot it from an Uzi down to Earth just for me. More on them later.
Around the same time, I fully immersed myself in the new wave of electro music.
And then, Crystal Castles settled itself ever so neatly on the path I was traveling, the path towards thrash music nirvana.

So. Let's judge the book by its cover. CC look like two stock dirty hipster scumbags who are ghoulishly pale and skinny, as to accentuate what look like thrift store duds (but are probably wildly overpriced designer gear). They look like to two caricatures from the sweaty electro MP3 gutter party scene. Alice is a stunner but smudges black makeup across here eyes and wears her hair dyed jet black in a Peter Pan like bowl cut. Ethan is a bearded, tight pants wearing background dweller on a synthesizer with hair that covers his stoic face.

But their music... god help me, it's something special. On Wikipedia someone explains their sound as "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".

Take "Love and Caring" for example. Alice screeches in a way that must make her cough up blood, the beat feels like a hundred tiny drill bits entering the cranium, and the old-school video game clinks and clanks are obnoxious and anxiety-inducing. But the combination somehow flows into primal rhythm, a shaking, high voltage banger. I was not only in love -- I was taken aback at what my heart was suddenly capable of decoding, deciphering and loving.

Their songs are not all like possessed pin ball machines. The sound transcends into a more groovy, danceable format with jams like "Reckless."


It's a new kind of dance music, a hybrid of mindless noise and clever composition, to make meaning with machines, to conjure emotion from computer files. It's kind of hard to explain, but Crystal Castles have given me something I really needed, something I was aching for, something I didn't even know existed.

I'll leave you with two things.

First, my friend, a humble but to-the-core hipster music junkie found CC's album in a record store in NYC. This photo is hilarious because it just happened like that, with no set up. That's him holding the record.

Last, I'll leave you with the Crystal Castles tune I can't get out of my head. It sneaks in through your ear buds and turns your brain into glitter. Enjoy.