Crystal Castles - Alice in the crystal fortress

It's 2004, and Ethan Kath is a solitary, melancholy 21-year-old from Toronto who for a couple of years has barely gone anywhere without a hoodie pulled over his head, spending his time composing beats by synthesizing sound chips. But Ethan hasn't always been like this: as a young teenager he started learning every instrument he could get his hands on, throwing himself into the most varied musical projects. His adventure began as drummer for an anarcho-punk band called Jakarta, while later, drawn to the lure of stringed instruments, he played bass for Cheerleader 666, a garage metal band (a project he would carry forward into Kïll Cheerleadër, with whom he released two albums as frontman under the pseudonym Ethan Deth), as well as guitar for a GG Allin cover band.

Definitive validation seemed to arrive with a folk duo, formed with his friend Pino Placentile, inspired by the songs of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. Unfortunately for Ethan, it ended in the worst possible way, when Placentile (to whom the first two Crystal Castles albums would be dedicated) died. It was a devastating blow for the young Canadian, so much so that he decided to abandon the genre altogether and move toward completely different sounds — cold, unfeeling and cybernetic — devoting himself to chiptune electronics.

But let's get back to our story. One evening, after a day spent composing video-game themes, Ethan decides to go out and ends up at a crust noise show. Taking the stage are Fetus Fatale, an all-female group fronted by fifteen-year-old singer Vicki Vale (a moniker inspired by the Batman comics) — perhaps not quite the band Ethan was expecting. Vicki, though, is a true riot grrrl, full of energy and life, who ran away from home at just 14 to go live in a punk-and-junkie squat, founding a band and, against all odds, continuing her studies. The moment Vicki picks up the microphone, Ethan realizes that this "unexplored poet" holds the key to his shot at redemption and success; so, after the striking performance and given Vicki's commanding stage presence, Ethan decides to hand her a CD-R containing 60 instrumental tracks, asking her to write lyrics and handle the vocals. Vicki accepts, joining the project and going back to using her real name: Alice Glass.

The singer gets straight to work and writes lyrics for five of the tracks Kath had composed. A few months later, in April 2005, the two meet up to record the songs: a brief microphone check, and Alice starts singing over Kath's instrumentals. Back home with the CD-R containing the recordings in hand, Ethan discovers a sixth track, recorded by the sound engineer while Glass was testing the microphone; shortly after, he uploads it to MySpace as "Alice Pratice". This is how Crystal Castles are born — the name of the project Kath chose to upload the first song under, inspired both by the Atari arcade game of the same name and by the cartoon She-Ra: Princess of Power. Kath later uploads the rest of the tracks from the CD-R, and songs like "Untrust Us" and "Magic Spells" become so popular online that they catch the attention of Merok Records, who offer the band a deal. Glass, meanwhile, having lost touch with Kath since the day of the recording, knows nothing about any of it — not about the existence of Alice Pratice, nor the result it produced: she is only brought into the loop after Ethan and the label make contact, and she is left rather shaken by the whole affair.

(I)

The London label Merok released the duo's first EP on July 9, 2006: Alice Pratice Ep (Merok Records, 2006). The record, pressed in a limited run of 500 copies on 7" vinyl, sold out in just three days, sparking a genuine scalpers' market on eBay. The band's popularity grows, and singles, festival slots and tours start pouring in. The second half of 2007 is an intense period for the duo: on August 13 and December 17 the singles "Crimewave" and "Air War" are released, during the summer they play Reading and Leeds, while in November they headline Unitaur, Vice magazine's UK tour, alongside These New Puritans and The Teenagers.

Alice and Ethan now find themselves with plenty of material on hand and a growing number of fans and curious onlookers, thrilled by their exuberant live performances. The duo pulls together the singles, some previously unreleased tracks and a few odds and ends, and on 17 March 2008 release their debut LP: Crystal Castles (Last Gang, 2008). The record is built on a sonic concept born from the fusion of vintage videogame noise and synth-pop rhythms blown up by a brutal, Atari Teenage Riot-style aesthetic. Of course, the marriage of electronics and punk attitude, with dark undertones, didn't start with them: artists like Trent Reznor had been doing it brilliantly years or even decades earlier, if we think of acts like Throbbing Gristle. The contemporary dance-punk scene itself is already crowded, in the latter half of the 2000s, with bands like Klaxons and Lcd Soundsystem, or their French cousins Kap Bambino, but what sets Crystal Castles apart is their ability to give the genre a dark, retro musicality, genuinely lo-fi, freeing nu-rave from its era of conspiracy-theorizing and recombining and updating it into an age of pastiche. The album opens with the occult chant "la cocaina no/es buena/para su salud" from "Untrust Us" by fellow Canadians Death From Above 1979, one of several covers and samples on the record, alongside "Good Time" (Drinking Electricity), "Vanished" (Van She), "Crimewave" (HEALT) and "Love And Caring" (Convox). Many of the melodies are built on chiptune, which proves to be the album's main ingredient.

Here we find the instrumentals "Redneck", which practically sounds like the theme of some 8-bit videogame, "1991", and most of the backing tracks, like the pinball-machine clatter of "Xxzxcuzx Me", "Through the Hosiery", "Black Panther" and "Love And Caring" itself, sampled from the Swedish band. The album closes with an ethereal track, "Tell Me What to Swallow", which would go on to become a regular trademark of the duo on subsequent albums.

The record, innovative and intriguing as it is, still feels fairly anchored to the genre's conventions. But beneath this arcade-hall electroclash, there was already a faint simmering of that codeine-laced dirty south cauldron, borrowed from purple drank, Halloween bonfires and witch burnings pulled from the most hidden recesses of childhood imagination, rave-party attitude and ancestral urges stolen from the subconscious of teenagers hooked up to their first 56K connections. The spark had been lit for that haunted house sound which, a few months later, would be codified into a genre by Salem, thanks to the right (southern) hip-hop contaminations, with a handful of EPs released between 2008 and 2009, opening the darkest chapter of hauntology.

The album is a commercial success: it reaches number 47 on the UK charts, and fares well with the more illustrious critics too (7.8 on Pitchfork, 8/10 and best debut of the year on NME) and even with the more scholarly ones (7/10 on scaruffi.com). An intense season of shows and touring opens up for Crystal Castles, who are everywhere throughout 2008, from Glastonbury Festival to the NME New Noise UK tour, with Alice Glass always over the top (despite a car accident and doctors' orders to rest, she performs with two broken ribs), wild and constantly stage-diving, to the point of catching the attention of a certain "lord of self-destruction" who used to literally tear stages apart, and who convinces her to open three dates for Nine Inch Nails. On Halloween night 2008, the duo performs in Los Angeles, in a legendary show where Alice Glass destroys the drum kit. 2009 carries on in the same vein of relentless performing, including an appearance at the famous Coachella Valley and Music Festival, at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, and supporting Blur at their reunion show in Hyde Park in July.

(II)

In December 2009, Ethan records the backing tracks for a new album in some of the most frigid places on the planet, from Ontario to Iceland, and once again hands Alice a CD-R with 70 tracks. Ethan really must be quite the closed-off type — there's never much sense of chemistry or collaboration visible between the two — but Alice writes the lyrics and records 35 vocal parts. A new record is announced for 2010, with a release date set for 7 June, and to build anticipation for the second album and whet fans' appetites, on 17 April 2010 the EP Doe Deer is released, in a limited run of 500 vinyl copies, along with the single "Celestica".

A week later, Crystal Castles (Fiction Records, 2010) is leaked online in digital form months ahead of schedule, forcing the duo to considerably bring forward the album's release. Only distributed physically from 24 May 2010 onwards, the album arrives with full-blown goth 2.0 cover art and shifts register, moving from electro-punk and a sometimes sterile brand of indietronica to a highly personal, captivating techno-pop style, ultimately forging a version of nu-rave steeped in occult flavor and a brand-new imagery.

The second half of the year also becomes the season of King Night, of Tri Angle Records and its manifesto "Let Me Shine For You", marking the definitive explosion of the witch house movement, a sort of musical and aesthetic virtual subculture that moves through social networks and bandcamp. The album opens with the distorted nightmare of "Fainting Spells", followed by the two tracks previously released on the Doe Deer/Celestica EP, where "Celestica" oozes chillout and vibes straight out of a "hit mania dance 1997" compilation, while "Doe Deer" comes across as a brutal lo-fi garage track in the style of Wavves, reimagined for Commodore 64.

Moving on, we find the surgical, minimal synths of "Baptism", punctuated by four-on-the-floor kicks and Glass's possessed vocals, followed by "Year of Silence", which brings deeper, even more saturated low tones but a cleaner, more subdued layered vocal on top. Techno backing tracks and sweet vocal melodies accompany "Empathy", "Suffocation" and "Pap Smear", while the ethereal, alien "Violent Dreams" conjures up hypnagogic hallucinations. "Vietnam" and "Birds" ride on chirping synths and vocal manipulations, all coated in a layer of white noise. "Not In Love", a cover of new wave band Platinum Blonde, would later be released as a single in a different version sung by Robert Smith.

Closing out the record are the instrumental "Intimate" and the experiments of "I Am Made Of Chalk", where Glass's voice is distorted to the point of blurring the line between a sigh and white noise. For the singles "Celestica" and "Baptism", videos were shot by Rob Hawkins in which, with little imagination, everything revolves around Glass's disarming beauty, as she first wanders through a cemetery, then bounces around in a sort of close-up "live" performance.

The album's commercial success is repeated, and Crystal Castles II lands in the top 50 (2010) lists of the biggest international music sites, earning the title of "best new music" on Pitchfork. After the album's release, between 2010 and 2012, the tireless duo embarks on the usual, increasingly packed festival circuit, interrupted by Alice Glass's nasty ankle injury (in Spain) and the subsequent break-up (in Japan).

(III)

The third album (III) (Fiction Records, 2012), produced by Ethan Kath himself, is recorded in Warsaw, strictly using vintage equipment and no computers, in order to craft a unique sound. The record is skillfully doled out in the months beforehand, with as many as three singles released ahead of the album: "Plague", "Wrath Of God" and "Affection" (put up for streaming on Halloween day). Unfortunately for the duo, and despite all these marketing tactics, (III) ends up leaked a week before its release anyway.

The album comes with evocative, saturated cover art, a kind of modern-day Michelangelo's Pietà (captured by Samuel Aranda), showing a Yemeni woman embracing her son after he was exposed to tear gas during the protests in Sana'a. The sound turns even more haunted and dark, centering on themes of oppression and almost entirely abandoning chiptune. Instead, the chopped'n'screwed technique is used extensively (a Salem trademark and a mixing style drawn from southern hip-hop, where recordings are slowed down and tiny fragments of sound are extracted to create an alternating effect), while Glass drops her punk attitude à la Nic Endo and the distortion pedal almost entirely, in favor of a much heavier use of delay and ethereal vocalizing, drawing closer to fellow Canadian Grimes.

The atmospheres, recalling the Mexican project †‡†(Ritualz), grow more occult and oppressive, yet hypnagogic at the same time, and the tempo slows down compared to previous records, even though it still stays fairly brisk when set against the haunted house sound being produced in 2012.

As always, the tracklist proves quite varied, moving from the chopped basslines of “Telepath” to the dreamy melody of “Child I Will Hurt You,” all the way to Glass’s (fine) vocal performances on “Pale Flash” and “Transgender,” where echoes of the previous album still surface: “Insulin” reshuffles the ideas of “Doe Deer,” while “Violent Youth” seems to want to be the sequel to “Violent Dreams.”

Continuing down the path taken on the second LP, (III) is exactly the work you'd expect from the duo at this point in their career. It's the squaring of the circle with a genre they themselves helped inspire and which ended up influencing them back, turning them into a full-fledged witch house band. Still, the album is full of personality, never slipping into the clichés or banality of the genre. Sure, from here on it will be even harder for Crystal Castles to reinvent themselves, but Ethan and Alice, though written off before the release of every record, always manage to surprise us with an innovative spirit, putting themselves back on the line with their unmistakable pop flair.

Amnesty (I)

Four years after the release of (III), the project returns with a new album. Don't be fooled by the brand, because behind the name Crystal Castles in 2016 lies an entirely different business altogether. The story, at least for many, is already known: following personal and professional rifts that spilled over into a string of jabs and indirect digs between the project's two members, Alice Glass decided to cut all ties with Ethan Kath and embark on a solo career, which, with the lead single “Stillbirth,” already showed itself faithful to the punk, abrasive attitude that had defined her time in the group (as well as her incendiary live shows). Beyond the rather violent back-and-forth between the two, the departure doesn't seem to have thrown the producer and instrumentalist of the former duo off too much. Having recruited vocalist Edith Frances to the cause, he had little trouble getting back on track, releasing, a year after reforming his group project, the long-awaited—for better or worse—comeback record of the duo, titled Amnesty (I) (the title also hinting at the duo's affiliation with Amnesty International's humanitarian campaigns), signaling the start of a new cycle and a total change of course from the Glass era. And yet, the ties to the past are far from severed.

The problem with CC's fourth album, despite claims that it should be pinned on the new vocalist, essentially lies in Kath's production and compositional mannerism, a string of tried-and-tested tricks and familiar progressions that do little to show any real move past the electro-witch formulas of the previous two records. In this sense, Frances really does represent the most tangible new element brought to the duo's expressive range: decidedly more mesmeric and dreamlike, incapable of the furious punk outbursts that were Glass's trademark (a “Doe Deer,” these days, would feel completely out of place), the singer's voice lends the soundscapes and beats evocative ambient qualities, with a suppleness and docility even more pronounced than that of her, admittedly talented, predecessor. So where the vocals are given more room to come through (even in chopped and screwed form, as on “Kept,” the track closest to the video-game universe of the first album), is also where you catch the biggest (if still modest) flashes of artistic vitality, otherwise sadly buried under layers of autopilot, which does little to justify Kath's ambitious attempt at a turning point.

Despite the introduction of trap-leaning rhythmic elements (framing the noisy witch-house of “Chloroform” or adding a bit of spark to the ecstatic break of “Ornament”), the Canadian producer's game shows its limits very quickly, in a regular back-and-forth between heavier, more dynamic electro moments (the razor-sharp EBM barrage of “Enth,” the technoid noise of “Concrete,” in which an almost unintelligible melody drowns) and moments of greater atmospheric ease, in a contrast-driven approach that's already been thoroughly explored and, as a result, has long since run its course. If we're to single out a few highlights, the gritty production of “Sadist” is intriguing, bringing out the duo's more aggressive, iconoclastic side in witch-house mode, as are the electro surges of “Frail,” where the rhythmic pattern shows an unusual brilliance by Crystal Castles standards. For the rest, it's reheated soup all over again. As an attempt at redemption or diversification from the fine trio of past records, this falls well short of even the appearance of such a move. What one hopes is that future chapters in the “Amnesty” series will show the courage and sonic creativity Kath displayed in his first five years as a recording artist.

A year and a few days after the release of Ethan Kath's latest record under the Crystal Castles name, rather determined not to let anyone miss the contribution of his former partner in crime, comes the reply from Alice Glass, in the form of her debut EP, simply titled after her stage name. Co-produced by Jupiter Hoover-Keyes, former member of HEALTH, lending support to the melodies and lyrics penned by the Canadian artist, the record picks up the thematic and sonic thread laid out with the single “Stillbirth” two years earlier, and expands it into a six-track body of work, fleshing out the violent, deeply electric traits of an aesthetic already apparent before it was ever pressed to record.

Indeed, even without having heard the mini-album, it's easy enough to guess what's stirring within the eighteen minutes of Alice Glass. True to the beautiful-and-damned electro-goth diva image that has more or less made her name since the days of “Alice Practice,” with the know-how of her old project serving as an inevitable starting point, the EP splits its time between chaotic, post-industrial-flavored noise, sharpened by the artist's vocal delivery (the raucous, all-out “Natural Selection,” complete with “Doe Deer”-style screams, and the more orderly “Blood Oath,” with its danceable EBM evolution), powerful future-pop rhythmic shifts (“Forgiveness,” co-written with Atticus Ross), and disorienting sketches reminiscent of witch house's heyday, seasoned with a wide range of influences (the k-pop-tinged homage to Grimes on “White Lies,” the trap breaks of the single “Without Love”). It's a predictability that, rather than reinforcing stylistic traits that are in their own way unique, veers into the banal, or worse, into the sadly premeditated—a musical fan-service in which everything seems to shy away from any chance of revival or redefinition.

Ethereal, pitched vocal lines, powerful electro beats and sudden (but, precisely for that reason, expected) noise detours, and there you have it—a dish that Alice Glass, whether alone or in cahoots with Kath, had already prepared infinitely better before. Between poorly concealed lifts from her co-producer's former band and a lifeless rehash of an attitude that has long since curdled into mannerism, the actual start of the Canadian artist's solo career carries far too many shadows to suggest any real course correction down the line. Rather than genuine change, the path seems set from the very start.

In March 2022 Alice Glass released the album PREY//IV. The biggest mistake in assessing Alice Glass's debut solo album would be to file it under the witch house banner. Although the title suggests continuity with the path of Crystal Castles, the record moves, with deliberate gracelessness, across the frayed horizon of a somewhat dated hyperpop, so much so that the tracks that can actually be linked to the singer's past are limited to “The Hunted” and “Fair Game.” And it's precisely this last song that reminds us that what we're hearing isn't the musical mise en place of a teenage diary in the throes of emotional upheaval, as the often maudlin lyrics might suggest, but rather a concept album about abusive relationships. Back in 2017, Glass had in fact revealed the mental and physical abuse that former bandmate Ethan Kath allegedly inflicted on her starting from when she was 15 years old.

Traumatic ordeals that, on “PREY//IV,” find an outlet at times in the form of electronically-laced bubblegum pop (“Suffer and Swallow,” the single “Love Is Violence”), more rarely chasing after extreme, delirious pitch-shifts and post-industrial touches (“The Hunted”), or even sliding into eurodance territory (“Baby Teeth”). There are also particularly melodic moments, like “I Trusted You” and, above all, the single “Everybody Else,” which echoes Melanie Martinez's “Cry Baby.”

Thanks to “PREY//IV,” the Canadian artist sheds the role of prey and takes on that of predator, in a feverish interplay of catharsis and morbid decay, but, aside from a few nice flashes of inspiration here and there, truly abrasive moments are scarce, and Jupiter Keyes's production comes across as flat and anachronistic. More than “traumacore” (a term coined by Alice herself), PREY//IV, unfortunately, ends up sounding like a freeze-dried electro-goth record.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis (“Amnesty (I)”, “Alice Glass”), Giulia Quaranta (“PREY//IV”)

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