The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 2

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

Who are Crystal Castles?

Yeah, they're a band, but who are they really? Are they thieves? Geniuses? Thieving geniuses?

Producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass met in Toronto while performing community service. Why they were doing that --- reading to the blind --- varies with the publication. Billboard reported it as being a high school requirement. Spin implied it was court-ordered, saying that Glass had been busted for living in a squat and that Kath was clearing his record of an undisclosed offense.

In any case, they bonded over noise rock and began collaborating. They initially had friends give fake interviews, resulting in a stream of misinformation. (BTW, one of their labels is Lies Records. Uncanny!) Kath does interviews now, but the facts can change. He has maintained that he's often misquoted. He was quoted, however, in a 2007 interview by the now-defunct blog sparks vs space as saying, "Sometimes I'll just agree with whatever an interviewer is saying because I'm exhausted and I want the interview to be over. They always set up interviews after I've been up all night making tracks or after flying overnight from a show. I'll say anything so that I can go back to sleep. I usually don't even remember giving them because I'm half asleep."

Of his attempt to talk with the band (which, indeed, involved a sleepy Kath), Louis Pattison of Plan B magazine says, "Interviewing Crystal Castles feels oddly counterintuitive: the more you ask, the less you feel you know."

Crystal Castles courted controversy left and right in 2008, accused by chiptune musicians of Creative Commons violations and copyright infringement, and accused by a visual artist of stealing artwork (of Madonna with a shiner) for T-shirts and their "Alice Practice" single. Artist Trevor Brown eventually agreed to a settlement, but the chiptune dispute festers. Though Kath has said Crystal Castles weren't involved in the chiptune community, he was quoted in Spin's piece (from last September) as saying "there should be no limitations on art."

That sense of rebellious creation, naturally, extends to their self-titled debut album. The anarchic, provocative methods --- shrieks, circuit bending, legally questionable samples --- have been impressively honed into songs that prick and throb and challenge and excite. Transgressive art at its best.


Read my review of Crystal Castles here.