The Brag

Crystal Castles
And The Memorable Disasters
By Alasdair Duncan

Anyone who’s seen Crystal Castles’ live show knows that it’s all about going to extremes, about pushing the noise level as high as it can get. The synths threaten to malfunction, singer Alice Glass shreds her vocal chords, and the end result is a screaming, sweaty catharsis with the crowd. “It’s all about connecting with people,” keyboard player and programmer Ethan Kath tells me. “The live show is an experience for us, where we share sweat and blood with people. And spit.” I was caught down the front during Crystal Castles’ set at last year’s Parklife festival, and I can’t say I disagree with Kath’s assessment – blood and spit were indeed involved.

That Parklife show was great, but when I ask Kath if he remembers much about it, he tells me that for him and Alice the disasters are always more memorable than the successes. He illustrates the point. “We just toured South America, and we played this festival in a forest that was hours and hours away from any town or city… We had to ask children on the street where to turn and, like, a group of men walking sheep. We were like, ‘do you guys know if there’s a festival being set up around here?’, and they just pointed. This was after driving for four hours out of São Paulo. We got there and it was freezing cold and raining, and everyone was just hiding under trees,” he continues. “You remember things like that, you know?” Still, he maintains, it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as that time their entire road crew deserted them at once – it was getting hard following one of the busiest touring bands in the world. “They had all decided to leave us on the same day,” Kath says. “There was a love triangle involved too – two guys and a girl. When she said she was going home, they followed… It turns out she didn’t like either of them, which was actually pretty funny.”

Crystal Castles II, released earlier this year, is an astoundingly good record, easing off on the distorted waves of electronic noise in favour of a spooky, early ‘90s-inspired dream pop sound. Alice’s vocals, harsh at times and ghostly at others, are woven around samples of Sigur Rós and Stina Nordenstam; while it’s a wintry-sounding album – and not without its scary, abrasive moments – it’s still a record to get lost in, and play over and over again. The band see their sweaty live shows as deliberate contrasts to their recorded output. “We try to get people to connect with the live show,” Kath says, “and that’s the opposite of the albums, which we feel are really isolated, really lonely.”

For the first few weeks after the new album came out, I listened to it on near-constant repeat. One of the things that really struck me was the indistinct quality of Alice’s vocals. The single ‘Celestica’, with its ‘When it’s cold outside, hold me’ chorus, is one of the few songs on the album with discernible lyrics – the rest is more or less creepy abstraction, and I was left more or less free to imagine that Alice was saying whatever I wanted to hear. For me, not knowing the lyrics made the whole thing cooler and scarier – but when I mention this to Kath, he tells me that Crystal Castles’ songs were never intended to be ambiguous. “The lyrics are totally clear to us,” he says, “so we assume that everyone will be able to hear them. We never wanted to hide anything. The kid who runs our website put them up on there, so they’re available to see.”

Theoretically, Crystal Castles call Canada home; but they tour so much that they more or less live on the road – and it’s for this reason that most of their recording is done guerrilla-style. They set up keyboards, computers and sequencers when and where they can, to make the most of free time. One time, in Detroit, the duo recorded in an abandoned mall. “After we played there, there must have been three weeks off, so we found out about this strip mall that had been abandoned,” he tells me. “All the stores had just been left behind, and someone told us that we could set up our gear in any store we wanted to, and nobody would ever know or find out. The biggest factory in the area had shut down and everyone lost their jobs, which was, like, devastating for everyone, so a lot of people were leaving to look for work in other cities.”

Ethan and Alice made the most of their less-than-salubrious surroundings. “We just set up our keyboards behind the store and lived there for three weeks,” says Kath, “in a cesspit filled with rats and whatever. It was like living in a ghost town – it was completely isolated.” They kept to themselves throughout that time, not exploring for fear of being found out. “Most of the strip mall was boarded up, and we didn’t want to tear stuff down and draw attention to ourselves in case someone happened to be passing by,” he recalls. “We just hid in the store.”

Though a lot of their latest album was recorded in these kinds of settings, Ethan and Alice also spent some time in a professional studio – courtesy of friends they met on the road, Jacknife Lee and Paul Epworth. “We didn’t bring them in to help; it was more that we were on tour, going through their towns, and they invited us to use their studios, which was really nice of them. I have great things to say about them both; they just let us take over their studios for like a week each, and they were just really nice to us,” he continues, before a pause. “Usually people aren’t that nice to us.”

Who: Crystal Castles
What: Crystal Castles II is out now
With: Tool, Rammstein, Bloody Beetroots DC77, Wolfmother, M.I.A, LCD Soundsystem, Lupe Fiasco, Grinderman and more
What: Big Day Out 2011 @ Sydney Showground
When: January 26 (sold out) & January 27