Culture

Last Gang Records
(5/5)

I tried to put this album on while playing Settlers of Catan only to be met with protests from a friend about not wanting to be "drowned in a sea of hipsterness." Well whatever. If really enjoying Crystal Castles makes me a hipster 4 lyf, superglue my skinnies to me.
The Toronto two-piece consisting of producer and multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath and the sullen, screamy and sometimes sweet Alice Glass keeps this album diverse, with lo-fi screamers like ‘Doe Deer’ as well as dreamy tracks like ‘Celestica’. 
‘Baptism’ sits nicely between the two, with Glass’ racket suiting the roughness of the synths and drum machines but also managing to carry a catchy melody. On ‘Year of Silence’, Kath manages to take the vocal track from Sigur Ros’ triumphant ‘Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur’ and twists it into a slightly discordant dance track, but unfortunately falls a little short of the mark, giving the impression that remixes may have just become a day job here.
On ‘Violent Dreams’ and ‘Vietnam’ however, he manages to make up for that, sampling Stina Nordenstam’s ‘I See You Again’, with a Knife-like result on the first, and some nice straightforward four-to-the floor with swirly, tweaky arpeggiated synth touches. ‘Empathy’ and ‘Suffocation’ create some great brain pressure, compressed blips and washy layers of reverby vocals playing very nicely with each other. ‘Birds’ is pleasantly invasive, like New Order and amyl nitrate. 
It amazes me how much wear this band gets out of pretty much one beat. They do almost test the limits of one’s sanity by pushing the boundaries with repetition. Fortunately there are plenty of interesting sounds, and they seem to just be making the most of a good thing, kind of like label-mates Metric did on their first album, but a lot more brash. It probably all sounds fantastic on all that cheap Canadian acid the hipsters have been eating too.