Ramble: Crystal Castles

This was never published anywhere, I just had to put some words down.

Crystal Castles (2010), or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Relationship Between Art and the Artist and Make Sure My Precious Childhood Memories Weren’t Ruined.

Nine years ago, Crystal Castles (’10) was one of two albums I afforded regular rotation to for the entire summer. Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach was the other. If you were to watch any of my friend’s video diaries from back then, they’re the official backing band every time I make an appearance. You can hear ‘Suffocation’ coming out of my shitty phone speaker as I’m filmed walking around a park, and you can hear ‘Courtship Dating’ coming out of my friend’s bedroom sound-system while I film him playing video games. Crystal Castles are everywhere in that little period of my life. They’d made their way to me a few months prior, when my friend played ‘Alice Practice’ out of his own shitty phone speaker on the walk home from school one day. I was caught totally off guard, completely mystified, and honestly frightened of them. Alice’s voice, those synth sounds. What the fuck was going on here? It wasn’t so much a song to me as it was simply noise, and I was utterly intoxicated. It was unique to anything I’d heard before in my life. My tastes might have developed and diversified since, in the sense that nothing really surprises me in the same way anymore, but back then I was fifteen-years-old and my iTunes library was made up entirely of radio hits and American pop rock bands of various disciplines. You can see why Crystal Castles hit so hard. They were an awakening.

My initial interest in Crystal Castles was something of a continuation of the curiosity for chiptune acts like Henry Homesweet and Shirobon that I’d developed over the previous twelve months, but it was Alice and Crystal Castles who fully realised my potential to completely fall for electronic music. I suppose she’d have had it no other way. Henry Homesweet and Shirobon might have introduced me to the world of 8-bit music outside of my GameBoy Colour’s tinny speakers, but their approach was sugary and saccharine. As time revealed to me, they had little to offer me beyond that initial gimmick. Crystal Castles offered me something darker, though — something fiercely punk. Their renditions of 8-bit music were made to be ugly, to feel battered and bruised, to be both rough around the edges and at the centre, and they were all the more interesting for it. I didn’t associate the bleeping and popping synthesizers with the warm nostalgia of handheld video games; I associated it with a darker world I’d never previously been exposed to, a sense of foreboding, an early understanding the world’s more uncomfortable truths in a way I hadn’t done previously. With lyrics like those of ‘Xxzcuzx Me’, how could I not? (“Just because we don’t feel flesh doesn’t mean we don’t fear death”). After Crystal Castles, Boards of Canada seemed less obscure to me (Music Has the Right to Children was my favourite album for a long time after this), and it meant that Flying Lotus could make sense when I first heard ‘Clock Catcher’ eighteen months later. What began as a curious investigation into an alien presence developed into an obsession, and I was never really the same again.

So after months of having this album on repeat (pausing only to switch over to Plastic Beach) I was right against the barriers when they came to Manchester in the October of that year. Right underneath the speakers. I was in for it, even if I didn’t know it yet. I don’t remember much about the specifics of that evening, but I can vividly recall the overriding, enduring memories. I remember sweating a lot, and I remember peering through the strobe effects to make out any object I could grab onto so I wouldn’t be sucked into the crowd, and I know I suffered from headaches, earache, and partial deafness for a week afterwards. They were the ideal battle scars for a teenager like me, who wanted nothing more than to show off about the music I loved. But above it all, I remember feeling as thought I was experiencing it in third person. I suppose, being only sixteen, I was susceptible to getting carried away, but it felt incredible. I’d been to live rock shows before, but those bands tended to stand in full view on well-lit stages and chose to perform their songs politely. I’d never been to a live show for an electronic group before, so I hadn’t prepared myself for the disorientating intensity or the impact it might have on me. That moment when the speakers first emitted a serious bass hit — a bass hit that literally caused a gust of wind to rattle through my skinny jeans and visibly shake them — was like being hit by that first drop of rain as a downpour suddenly heads towards you. No way of escape. This was something completely new.

I was never oppressed or hard done to as a child. I was born into the lower middle class as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male, and I’ve never had body image issues. I don’t have to fight for my existence or justify it to anybody. With that being said, I was part of that group at school. The odd assortment of nerds, geeks, kids with oversized backpacks and glasses, emos, queer kids, skaters, weird kids, drama kids, and the kids with no other group to call home. Not exactly an outcast, but considered enough of an outsider by the popular kids to feel like I was different. Going to that Crystal Castles show, listening to that album on repeat for so long, it reinforced the feeling that I was an outcast, but it made me feel part of something, a movement, that I was unique and special in a way that I absolutely wasn’t. I’d found my fellow “outcasts”, I suppose. I was part of nothing, there was no movement — I was a totally ordinary teenager simply experiencing an ordinary cultural education. And yet, I felt equally isolated and invincible whenever I heard album opener ‘Fainting Spells’ wind up for the hundredth time, as though I’d finally been introduced to a kindred spirit. I was on my own in liking this music, but that made me feel powerful and protective of it. That’s the power this album had over me, and mostly still does. As much of an outcast I’d convinced myself I was, this album was a reminder that there was always somebody proud of being further down the food chain than I was, more of an outcast and happy to declare it. Proud enough of standing out that they could turn it into abrasive art that spoke to thousands of people.

So how the fuck do I reckon with everything that’s happened with Crystal Castles since, and was probably happening at the time?

With everything that’s happened since, it can prove hard to listen to this album in retrospect. Crystal Castles as I knew them in 2010 have been dead for a very long time, and everything that’s been revealed in the last two years has honestly tainted some of the above. Because I believe Alice’s version of events, it’s not easy to confront the possibility that the band I loved as a teenager, who had changed the way I approached music, wasn’t so much a band as it was a one-sided relationship that just so happened to produce good tunes. I still listen to Crystal Castles’ first three albums, but I can never work out if my belief of her story affects the group’s art or if my experiences with it are invalidated now. How do I confront something like this? If Alice was simply a fan of the group who had been taken advantage of by Ethan backstage at a concert, then it would be a simple case of shelving his work and finding new things to love. It would be a difficult sacrifice, but it would be for the greater good. Alice was as much a part of the band as Ethan, though, and she was as involved with CC (‘10)’s creation as he was. To shelve CC (’10) would be to shelve her creative input too. The dynamic is different to most artist-involved abuse cases and, as a result, is increasingly more complicated. But after quite a lot of thought, I think I’ve come to hold the belief that such revelations have exposed a new layer to CC(’10) and have, in turn, exposed its true strength: Alice’s story, and the messages she was trying to send us all along.

Ethan Kath’s mixes, instrumentals, and beats are really impressive. That was all Crystal Castles were once, way back in 2005, and they form a considerable portion of what makes this band so special to me. It would be foolish to suddenly deny Kath’s importance to their sound, even after the allegations. But any beauty or tenderness that endures from CC(’10) does so because of Alice and Alice alone. I’m biased here, but above all, I listened to their music for her voice and her words. I bought the magazines they were featured in to see what she had to say. I went to their shows to see her act like a true rebel. I’d read the stories about her jumping into the crowd to punch somebody and I dreamed of seeing her do something like that. Kath might have been the one lurking in the background, labouring over his tower of synthesizers and mixers, and Alice might have stood up front on stage, diving into the crowd and shouting at us, but she was always the one who seemed more elusive and guarded, more mysterious. I waited outside before that 2010 show, between the venue and their tour bus, and at one point she walked past my friends and me. I’d seen her beat people up on YouTube, screaming into the microphone as this monstrous punk with something to shout about — she scared me as much as she fascinated me. But in this moment she appeared as a tiny, fragile, grey doll. A friend of mine shouted “Love you, Alice!” and she looked towards us, returning a meek half-smile and a tiny wave of the hand, almost stopping herself. Away from the stage, I guess that’s who she really was.

It’s a person who appears more often on CC(’10) and CC(’12) than she does on CC(‘08). She brings a softness and a sense of inner turmoil to the debut — notably on ‘Tell Me What to Swallow’ and ‘Black Panther’ — but the tenderness on that album can only be derived from reading her words as opposed to hearing them. On the follow-up, there’s a tangible increase in tuneful melancholy. ‘Celestica’, the crowning jewel of their second album and arguably the band’s finest moment, was always eerily beautiful to me, even without reading through Alice’s words, and it’s home for the shy woman I guess she really was. I’d come to know Crystal Castles through ‘Alice Practice’, through ‘Xxzcuzx Me’, and ‘Through the Hosiery’ — their coarse electroclash, their abrasive sound selections, their uncompromising persona. Alice’s defence, I suppose. ‘Celestica’, though, stands almost completely alone in their discography as the closest they ever got to producing dream pop, and it reveals something truly and tragically angelic in the process. At the time, I believed the lyrics to be gorgeous and endlessly quotable, but mostly cryptic. “If I’m lost, please don’t find me / If I drown, let me sink” was written all over my school books, but I was never completely in touch with how directionless and bewildered Alice really sounded here, or how her longing for solitude was being communicated to me. What she was actually doing, as many of her lyrics from all three of their albums now appear to have been doing in retrospect, was forming cries of help and sending messages while trapped in an environment she was desperate to break out of. It’s something she’s since confirmed: “I was miserable and my lyrics indirectly spoke to the pain and oppression that I was enduring”.

Across CC(’10) there are moments where Alice is muffled under the instrumentals, almost indecipherable (‘Suffocation’, ‘Doe Deer’, ‘Birds’), there are moments where she shines through (‘Empathy’, ‘Baptism’, ‘Celestica’), and there are moments where she isn’t even present (‘Vietnam’, ‘Not in Love’, ‘Year of Silence’). With the debut’s tracklisting taking similar form, it’s never completely clear just how much Kath believed Glass to be a part of the duo. Comments Kath made in 2015 suggested that he felt Glass hadn’t been as integral as I thought she was. “[Going solo] should be rewarding for her considering she didn’t appear on Crystal Castles’ best-known songs”, he said. “People often gave her credit for my lyrics and that was fine, I didn’t care.”

At the time, before the allegations surfaced, it was heartbreaking to see such division between them. Knowing that my favourite band hadn’t parted on good terms was horrible. I didn’t fall in love with their third album in quite the same way as I did their second for a number of reasons (mostly because my tastes changed), but I still wanted the best for both of them and this split didn’t feel like anything close to that. It was tough to hear Ethan so blithely remark that his creative partner — the member of the group I idolised from the very start — hadn’t actually been as important to their music or to my memories as I initially thought. In fact, I recall that it briefly reshaped my memories of the group in such a way that I doubted most of what I’d felt about this record back in 2010. I’d worshipped Alice the most, yes, but I’d still idolised Ethan, even if it was to a lesser extent. I remember finding the original versions of the Sigur Ros, Platinum Blonde, and Stina Nordenstam songs he’d sampled for CC(’10) and being totally blown away by how he’d managed to manipulate them into the final product. As he explained after the fact, some of Crystal Castles’ best-known songs don’t feature Alice at all. So after the group split in such acrimonious circumstances, and after the acrimonious circumstances turned into credible allegations, how could I make peace with the fact that songs such as ‘Intimate’ and ‘Not in Love’ — which were predominantly, or even entirely, his creation — were made by somebody who, by 2018, was investigated by police for numerous sex crimes? Is there even a way to make peace with it?

I’m not sure there’s ever a way to correctly deal with it as a fan of their music in a way that ensures everybody wins.

The following, though, has at least come to me with hindsight: what CC(’10) manages to accomplish, and what makes it so interesting, is not necessarily the sound of two artists combining their talents to great effect. What truly makes the record special, looking back, is the dynamic that arises when one voice tries to break through before it is overpowered by external forces. It’s Alice’s vulnerability and desperation straining to break through Ethan Kath’s control and stewardship. Their albums are arguments as much as they are collaborations. During ‘Fainting Spells’, the opener, you can just about hear Alice shouting “We evaporate without condensation / But heaven is still your only expectation” way in the back of the mix, underneath everything else. This argument between the pair persists right through the album, all the way to the closer, ‘I Am Made of Chalk’, which definitely contains lyrics, but with piles upon piles of effects masking whatever Alice is saying, it’s hard to decipher any of them. Hearing her voice fight so defiantly against the tide is how you know the fury, the melancholy, the tenderness, and the emotion in her performance is completely earned. Deliberately obscured vocals were always part of their aesthetic — perhaps so the pair could remain elusive, cryptic, and mysterious — but there’s something to be said for an album which has continued to evolve and has come to represent new things, even when it’s been a finished product for almost a decade. Kath’s role in this dynamic can’t be ignored, but it’s Alice who has emerged as the sympathetic protagonist of the story this record tells.

And if her recent setlists are anything to go by, it’s a story Alice wants to continue telling. She still performs ‘Love and Caring’, ‘Suffocation’, ‘Alice Practice’, ‘Celestica’, among other Crystal Castles songs. They might have all originated as Ethan Kath’s creations, but they’ve endured as pillars of Alice’s story. We should continue to honour that. It’s now eighteen months since Crystal Castles played a show of any description in their current form (Edith Frances replaced Glass on vocals in 2014), while Alice continues to tour. This isn’t a competition, and playing shows isn’t proof that Alice “won”, but it does provide me with a clumsy solution to moral quandaries which have revolved in my mind ever since these allegations came to light. Simply put, part of Alice’s long journey to recovery is preserved in these albums, and to ignore them would be to ignore the early chapters of it. And to pick CC(‘08), CC(‘10), and CC(’12) apart, so that only Alice’s tracks remain, would contribute to a distortion of her story and valuable context, too. As I said before, the three albums work as arguments, as Glass’ messages make their way out from underneath Kath’s instrumentals, and to ignore these arguments would remove crucial context from her story, too. My memories with the duo’s first two albums have caused me to analyse this in such a way that I would never afford to other artists, but I have no idea how else to approach this. The album means too much to me to let it drift away, it means too much to Alice to let it drift away, too. Maybe it’s okay to let the tunes play while the elephant sits in the corner of the room, minding its own business.