Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles, at its best, struggles to convey the effects of music over-exposure, the numbness to sonic-stimulation that ipod dependency induces.

On Untrust Us and Crimewave, all of the components of language are present, but the vowel-sounds, consonants and phrasings fail to add up to anything comprehensible; they sound like words, bear all their superficial life-signs, but never register in the brain and communicate as words should. Just as so much of the vast swathes of new music flowing through white wires and out of computer speakers frequently sounds like it should be great, but ultimately fails to resonate or impact in the way great music should, the effect is disillusioning; everything is being done ‘right’ but the desired end never comes about.

The other vocal tracks like Alice Practice, Courtship Dating and Love and Caring give some expression to the feelings this condition stimulates. Despite all the anguished screams of stressed-out isolation, nothing cuts through and impacts fully; in fact the angrier and more affected the cries become, the more they disintegrate and are subsumed into the totalitising white-noise morass of digital distortion, emasculated and reduced to a waveform which alienates sound from any intent that once lay behind it. This is the sound of subjective desire for emotional expression accumulating into one overbearing mass, pouring ever further into meaninglessness as every extra attempt overloads the listener’s response system, causing it to block everything out.

Crystal Castles really only works in this context of overexposure leading to desensitisation. Free your ears for a few days, let them regain their sensitivity, and the album is almost unlistenable - both because of the over-compressed production, and the abundance of familiar stylistic signifiers that slip too easily into line with those of the rest of the rock-dressed-in-dance’s-clothing crew (especially prevalent on CC’s instrumental tracks). But this context-specifity is what makes the album so compelling, its attempt to articulate (as a symptom rather than a cure) those sensations of system-jam which nothing outside of this context appears able to do.

The album’s conclusion, Tell Me What To Swallow, seems to imply that the way out is a return to introspective ethereal acousticness, but does this not lead only to a complete solipsistic self-immersement; a solution just as horrific and isolating as the alternative of a desensitized, but fully aware, inability to communicate?

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Separate but related, Blissblog and Please Keep Dancing take up the problem of contemporary beats and bass, and a possible solution in the form of wonkiness, in particular Rustie’s recent output. What is most striking about this stuff is how familiar it all sounds, the Keyshia Cole remix in particular not feeling wholly different to a lot of Polow Da Don’s or Timbaland’s productions, except for being slightly more cluttered and a little less danceable; for the latter reason, BlissBlog makes the comparison to 90’s drill n bass/IDM. This speaks volumes for how far underground music has fallen; its the Pollow/Timbo’s who occupy that territory which lives off both experimentation and popularity (and have done for a good while now), while the underground becomes increasingly conservative, formulaic and contented.