CD Review: Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles has always been a deeply polarizing band. They play a unique, aggressive fusion of electronic music and noisy, punkish rock. Their shows are infamously chaotic; at the Glastonbury Festival in 2008, the show's organizers cut Crystal Castles' set short because vocalist Alice Glass refused to stop climbing atop the stage rigging and diving into the audience. Perhaps most egregiously of all, their conception of intellectual property is extremely dishonest. Several of their early songs prominently featured uncleared samples, and for years they used visual artist Trevor Brown's image of a bruised, bloody Madonna (the singer, not the virgin) as their de facto logo despite Brown's numerous attempts to secure compensation.

Their second album, Crystal Castles, will most likely inspire every bit as much disagreement as their first, but I expect the reasons informing the debates will be different. Whereas their debut was swooning and luxuriant in its atmospherics, lacking the insistently repetitive drum programming of most electronic music, this album feels more indebted to dance music. It's a risky move on the band's part. Those stunned by the originality of their debut might be turned off by their move, slight though it may be, towards the mainstream; those who despised them the first time around probably won't find the change in the band's sound significant enough to merit reevaluation.

That's not to say that they've come up short. Ethan Kath, who produces the band’s music and handles its instrumental side, retains his ability to repurpose the tropes of electronica into a more emotional, affecting sound. Glass remains the chameleon she was on their debut, shifting between girlish innocence and punky growls. Though her voice appears less often than on the first album and in an even less intelligible fashion, her ability to fit her vocal styles to Kath's backing tracks has grown.

Kath certainly hasn't lost his taste for the aggressive, either; song for song, Crystal Castles is significantly more dissonant than its predecessor. “Doe Deer,” the album's second single, is by a long stretch the noisiest song they've ever made. Overtop synths sounding like hardcore punk played through a Commodore 64 computer, Glass screams so incoherently and angrily that her voice becomes nearly glossolalic.

“Baptism” fuses Glass' keening vocals with an instrumentation that captures the band's fusion of the pretty and destructive better than any of their previous work. The album's final track, “I Am Made of Chalk,” is the most surprising and uncharacteristic. Beginning with a red herring – a squealed, garbled burst of synths – it subsequently becomes overtly beautiful and elegiac. Atop a slow, resplendent synth line, Kath includes a burbling vocal track that sounds sad, inhuman, and mortally wounded. It's less 2001's HAL than the fashion in which William Basinski's Disintegration Loops seemed to capture the unstoppable march of entropy and the passing of time itself.

Nothing about the way Crystal Castles makes music seems simple at all. They're less interested in the way they can force their respective voices and instruments to make new and interesting sounds than they are in their emotional and physical connotations. That sets them apart from a great many similarly high-minded genre fusionists, and, for me, renders any criticism about their ethics or moral fiber moot. You don't have to like them as people, but it'd be a shame to let concerns about Kath and Glass' lack of morals and basic human decency, however fair and valid they might be, make you miss out on something this special.