A friend recently asked me about the shelf life of the Crystal Castles phenomenon. Honestly, I have no idea if they can hang on to the buzz, but I want them to last for as long as possible - mostly to keep my own buzz going.
Harsh 8-bit distortion, bouncy post-dub bass lines, nods to Gothic fashion, and dark feelings make up Crystal Castles' trick-or-treat bag of pop culture. If you haven't been forced by a hooded, angsty teen or twenty-something to listen to this band, than count yourself in the minority. The question remains: will all this hype last?
Last night a few hundred drunk young people converged on a medium sized club in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle. When I arrived at 9:15, the floor was almost full. Maybe it doesn't matter at the end of the night, but the opening bands were terrible. Lymbic System sounded like the Album Leaf circa 2002. David Wolf sounded like Justice smoking crack in the bathroom of a suburban middle school.
Finally after much tension building, Alice, the singer, comes on. She wears her usual corpse make-up and modest suit of dark street clothes. Strobes start going off and producer/multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath, slouched and unshaven, begins bouncing up and down behind his Microkorg. The crowd skips a beat and then explodes into a mass of floor-bouncing wildness.
Exuding a kind of epileptic/narcoleptic confidence, Alice spends the majority of the show draping herself around the stage and front rows of the audience. Ethan's posture is unchanged. The audience, including my self, is drenched in sweat. When a friend of mine complained about the sweat, I explained that she should justify the abject grossness by imagining herself having sex with everyone in the room.
Afterwards, walking to the bus stop, I realized that Crystal Castles in the new mainstream punk: loud, physical, and curiously nihilistic. I can't put my thumb on what the band is supposed to mean culturally except that the kids are not alright.
I've seen Crystal Castles three times now and I notice no substantive change to their live show. It only gets louder, better rehearsed, and more terrifying every time. I eagerly await any interesting changes they make to their sound in the future. Realistically, it would be unreasonable to expect musical growth from a band whose main selling points are a synthesizer and a Gothic opera screamer.
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