Behind and beside Canadian electronic noisies Crystal Castles are lines of strobes which they use relentlessly from the moment they arrive onstage. It’s hard to even look, such is the visual barrage, and when I do, for as long as my retinas can stand, I only see a manic silhouette, flinging itself around, long hair whipping about like a dervish having a fit. As opening song “Concrete” draws to a close, this proves to be pink-maned frontwoman Edith Frances who now, and throughout the whole gig, squirts bottled water over her head and on the front rows.
On one level, it’s surprising Crystal Castles are gigging at all. When the band’s original singer Alice Glass left a couple of years ago in a spume of animosity, she also announced it was the end of the band. Instead mainstay Ethan Kath joined forces with Iowan singer Frances, who first crashed into him, literally, in the mosh-pit at an LA concert by Detroit hardcore punkers Negative Approach. The pair’s recent album, Amnesty (I), from which all proceeds from physical sales go to Amnesty International, effectively continues Crystal Castles’ blend of industrial battering, bangin’ trance and twinkling, oddball electro-pop.
There’s a lack of light and shade, of nuance, but the crowd doesn’t mind
Kath is stage-left and at the back is drummer Christopher Chartrand who adds a very human energy to the raucous electronic onslaught. The focus is on songs from Amnesty (I) but they also chuck in Glass-era favourites, such as “Crimewave” and “Celestica” which receive a warm reception from the mostly 20-something crowd. Frances, in a choker, wearing black, appears to have done something to her right knee which is heavily bandaged, but it doesn’t stop her bouncing about in a way that honours her notoriously demoniac predecessor.
When Crystal Castles appeared around a decade ago, they brought something new to electronic music. Their albums, three with Glass, before the current one, combine edgy, glitched electronics with vitriolic punk attitude, the whole thing produced in a thoroughly original way that sometimes recalls video-game music (birthing a style briefly known as “chiptune”), as well as drawing elements from the cheesier fringes of dance music. The odd thing, especially given how Kath often distorts the singer’s vocals beyond recognition, is how emotive and lovely the end result is.
Live, the band maintain a raging dynamic interspersed with the occasional twinkly – albeit warped – synth motifs. There’s a lack of light and shade, of nuance, but the crowd doesn’t mind. After a while the venue simply becomes a stroboscopic electro-punk rave. The song lyrics are inaudible, chopped about, mostly treated as another sound in Kath’s armoury, fighting it out with gated synths and kick-drums. In fact, the night is really a sort of an enhanced Ethan Kath DJ/laptop set, with added drums and vocals, and Frances as a feral hype-person. And, for an hour and a quarter, Concorde 2 goes barmy to it. For me, although it was enjoyable, it didn’t feel as if Crystal Castles were offering enough that was new, or that they were entering a new phase, ripe for new heights. Their revamp, a chance to dive off the map, sticks instead to the “If it ain’t broke” credo, and offers an admittedly juicy extra helping of what came before.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Concrete"
