Crystal Castles

people who give a shit about whether something is old news are so 1997

I just remembered that I preordered this. Still not out, I guess. The Liars remix posted on Pitchfork today is pretty excellent.

they were total dicks to everybody when they came through town but I loved their show anyway

still, their manners were fucking appalling

there are probably some people who still think that means they might be Proper Pop Stars I guess though

Fuck is this?

Dunno. Heard a couple tracks a year or so ago. Longer, I think. Fall of '06? Lo-fi 8-bit party noise w/ screaming? Just listened to a bunch of more recent stuff. Very, very bad.

love these guys. makes me want to get the old NES up and working and attempt to beat megaman 2

They're an acquired taste (especially the screaming), but their remix of Klaxons - "Atlantis to Interzone" is great.

'Knights' is good, well the 'chorus' is phenomenal altho the whiny synth noise elsewhere does grate.

'air war', people

there's a comp of their remixes going around that's good

remixes by them(him?) weirdly tend to be better than their original material. i guess it fits with their approach that they would put more effort into taking bloc party's money than putting out their own shit, though.

rmx of goodbooks' "leni" is A+

this has crazy grown on me

God, there are few bands I hate more than them, but this is probably a condition of living in the same city as them.

I went ahead and preordered the Magic Spells 12", even though it didn't say when it was actually coming out.

I should probably check and see if I ever got charged for this. I Paypal'd it.

Basically the new rave Test Icicles, right?

More like the "Donkey Kong" Test Icicles. I was over all this 8-bit punk/chip music in about 30 seconds.

:/

Ow they make my ears go hurty.

i'm being asked to give up my radio show this week so that they can broadcast their concert.

REJECTED

i love my lame city friends big upping this band

lame-city

i like that health track they did.

r u a bolg?

wham city

fuck that... TEN CITY

parts of this sound like the lost moby/alec empire tape. (which most people would mean as an insult but i don't.) "courtship dating" is pretty good.

Saw them live a few weeks ago and they weren't convincing, but I like the album.

Okay I fold, the album is really great. I'm trying to work out why something this cheap and shoddy and trashy is this affecting, and I can only put it down to that sense of sadness running through everything. It's like dying in Zelda over and over again.

Laughed at the Zelda thing, but you're right - a lot of it is really sad sounding. Haunting and sad.

I'm actually a little disappointing because I was all fired up to give this a real kicking. Even the ones with the screaming work, I can totally see why they used Alice Practice in that grieving scene in Skins now.

DisappointED, even. Although I am a little disappointing as well.

man fuck this band
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/05/05/chiptune-music-theft-continues-crystal-castles-abuses-creative-commons-license/

wau

still ike the album, tho

Maybe start a new thread? I know that ilx unlike other boards does encourage the use of older threads, but rather than retconning the opinions of a decade ago we could just move the discussion to somewhere with a more appropriate title.

looks like somebody fixed it

Didn't we already knew Ethan Kath was a huge douchebag? He wrote this when Alice released her first solo single:

https://i.imgur.com/0VNlN10.png

yeah you totally don't care dude

https://i.imgur.com/0VNlN10.png

yeah I remember that happening, and people generally thinking he was a fucking dickbag because of it. I certainly never gave them any time again after she left

Also someone should tell him CC best known song is Crimewave.

You know in the context of Alice's statement that facebook post from Ethan is proof that he is an insecure piece of shit and he did enjoy undermining her.

Seems all of CC upcoming concerts have been cancelled. Hope this is a career killer for him.

I can't defend Alice either though, two friends worked with her in some venues and she's also very rude and shitty to everyone.

Seems like that's two rather different things being compared.

also sounds like she may have some reasons for being emotionally uncomfortable in work situations with strangers

Yeah of course they’re different things you’re right. Ethan apologists on the CC fb page right now are making me sick.

So much of that fourth Crystal Castles album was trolling Alice. He diminished her in statements, literally wrote her out of the band's history in its official press material, and seemed to be mocking her (and really all women) with that cover. It all seemed distasteful at the time, but in light of all the new information it's fucking abhorrent—an entire album of an abuser taunting his victim. Maybe the most morally unconscionable record since Chris Brown's Graffiti.

Yeah I feel like Alice's past rep as "difficult" has to be understood in this context. First of all she was just a kid when she started, and who knows what kind of encouragement he gave her to act out, how much she was following his lead, etc. No consolation to people who had to deal with snotty-young-punk behavior, but she was clearly coming from a weird place throughout the CC experience.

I was surprised that until this week there hadn't been much observable backlash from their fanbase (and some people who liked them enough to buy tickets to a show didn't even know that Alice wasn't in the group anymore).

https://www.facebook.com/pictureplane/posts/1688757071187015

jfc some of the comments on that thread

"seemed to be mocking her (and really all women) with that cover" the girls on swings? really?

Four nearly identical girls, on an album that swaps out one woman for another like it's no big deal. Seemed meant as commentary on how replaceable/interchangeable women are to me. How did you read it?

i never got into this band but i almost did cos i liked the name alot (and she was v compelling as a performer) . i remember Hipster Runoff talked about them a lot and did some ironic/unironic objectifying of the lead singer. the whole thing is disgusting. really glad that she is out of that situation. holy crap.

fuck that fb post btw

i read it as some goth kids on a swing, but I didn't think about it very much either.

(I've never listened to this band btw, but at one point was booked to open for them on this tour so ended up reading way more about them than I ever wanted to)

#humblebrag

Swapping out Alice Glass for basically a doppelgänger when she quit was eerie

I feel very disturbed by all of this given how much I listened to those first two albums in college

i thought the last album cover was just a nod to the horror film meme re scary dead eyed kids.

I see someone's throwing a cow.

https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/11/crystal-castles-ethan-kath-sues-alice-glass-for-defamation/

Suing her for just 300k? This will not end well for him.

The actual facebook post with his comment is worse:

https://www.facebook.com/ccrystalccastles/photos/a.10151199490370335.807013.21720030334/10159505110390335/

Passive aggressive asshole makes me think Alice is the one telling the truth and it will backfire to him. He's publicly drawing her as a drug addict with mental issues to try to discredit her account and then goes on to suggest that the only reason she is coming forth is that CC has "new success" without her - despite the fact that almost nobody really cares about either of them anymore, music-wise.

Also what the fuck at him saying he fully supported her when she left? Talking shit left and right to the media about her the minute she left, publicly shaming her doesn't seem very supportive tbh

four more accounts of ethan's predatory behavior towards fans aged 14 to 19:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-indie-rocker-accused-of-sexually-abusing-young-fans

Surprised that nobody has replied to this. Then again, not sure what to say about it myself, apart from "fuck you Ethan Kath."

pretty much.

not being sarcastic or trying to make light of but the answer i truly think is far fewer people care about crystal castles than they did a few years ago

The transgressive thrill of their abrasive feral/digital sound is kind of undermined by knowing it was made by a predatory creep and a woman under duress. It's a shame because I did love it.

Of all the stories of abusers in music over the last couple of years, I think this is the one that sickens me the most, because this is the one critics were most complicit in. Sometimes the a musician is trash comes as a total surprise, but in this case the signs were there—three albums that sounded like a woman being abused; that vile Madonna image; Kath's horrid personality. We bought into myth that it was all just art. I feel retroactively gross for having enjoyed those albums so much.

The Madonna thing alone should have been a "fuck this, this is exploitative and gross" deal breaker, but we looked the other way.

three albums that sounded like a woman being abused

Genuinely curious what this means? (I've never listened to one of their albums)

Their stuff is all over YouTube, that's kind of a hyperbolic description of Alice Glass' raw, distressed vocal style rather than suggesting actual abuse took place during the recording. At least I assume it is.

It's really not hyperbolic at. Don't want to embed anything b/c I don't want to be responsible for giving this band a cent of revenue, but one of their defining aesthetics, starting with "Alice Practice" and peaking on their third album, is "subjugated woman trapped in torturous hell, clawing like fuck to get out." Which is pretty powerful until you learn that may not have been a vision she consented to; it was a situation her bandmate put her in. This shit genuinely sounds like torture porn now.

on the other hand, the idea that a critic, even the most empathetic possible listener paying the closest possible attention, would be able to (let alone expected to) make the leap from "this album in an abrasive-sounding genre sounds abrasive" to "a woman is actually being abused in real life" doesn't sound reasonable. (it also isn't a perfect one-to-one correspondence -- there are legions of cases of industry abuse where the music sounds perfectly shiny and innocuous.)

(also in case it isn't clear abusers are scum and fuck them)

I was going to say something akin to that but katherine said it better

yup

Glass herself has debunked the myth that “Alice Practice” etc were recorded without her consent or knowledge. She cites them as Kath’s campaign to minimise her creative role in the band, a bit like “well she didn’t know what she was doing but I saw the potential.” So that’s not abusive per se, whatever the ugliness of the relationships outside that context.

Although if you meant that the motivation behind the extremist/desperate tone of her vocals was her real life horrifying relationship, and that’s abhorrent, then yes agree absolutely.

yeah I agree there was no way to make that leap based on the music alone. But critics did look the other way when the band cynically exploited domestic abuse for marketing purposes, and critics readily bought into the narrative that both Kath and Glass were both difficult, almost equally problematic people. Again, not saying we could have or should have known what was actually going on, but there were some red flags that make me feel a shitload guiltier about having supported this band than I do compared to, like, Pinegrove or something

Although if you meant that the motivation behind the extremist/desperate tone of her vocals was her real life horrifying relationship, and that’s abhorrent

yeah exactly, even disregarding the circumstances of the recordings, which I can't know (maybe they were fun and enjoyable and a great experience for everybody), it's horrific knowing the muse wasn't fictional, that it was in some pretty clear ways a reflection of a toxic, controlling relationship. And it's really not much of a leap based on the reporting to guess that Kath justified his abusive tactics as "in the interest of the art" or some horrid BS like that

Extremely good news.

I won in court today!! the defamation lawsuit against me was dismissed !
thank you so much for the love and support throughout this ugly process

— ALICE GLASS (@ALICEGLASS) February 23, 2018

very nice

Excellent news

katherine otm

I really liked this band and definitely part of that was this obscurely sinister aspect of their sound, but now those features can only be understood as sickening. But only in retrosepcr. At the time I never thought it “sounded like a woman being abused,” I thought it sounded like a dynamic, unusal vocalist giving voice to feelings like desperation and anger.