Kath described their musical style as " AIDS Wolf get into a fight with New Order." In making their music, the duo mainly focused on how "abrasive" noise music was as Glass explained, "annoying people still evokes an emotion in them.
Ethan Kath on the electronic sound of Crystal Castles AIDS Wolf is going to annoy you with guitars we're going to annoy you with the insides of old electronics. We were just breaking apart electronics and toys to get annoying sounds. I've actually read some very positive reviews for the 2004 demos." Production and composition As Kath explained, "I originally gave Alice a CD of 24 songs to choose from back when we first started, and some kid took 16 of them and put them up on the Internet as the album, and people have been reviewing it. This version was a set of demos recorded in 2004, while the actual LP consisted of content recorded from 2005 to 2007. However, an article published in Now in February 2008 reported of a fake version of the LP published around several file-sharing sites and garnering numerous downloads. In order to prevent online leaking of the record, Last Gang did not issue any previews of it. The Montreal-based Last Gang Records issued Crystal Castles' self-titled first studio album in North America and the United Kingdom in March 2008. Following a set of sold-out 7-inches releases on other UK labels, Crystal Castles became popular to an international level. In 2005, United Kingdom label Merok Records discovered Crystal Castles via a mic check recording titled " Alice Practice" that was uploaded to MySpace in 2005 and released an extended play of the same name by the duo in 2006. Crystal Castles includes some of these demo recordings that were previously unreleased. Kath gave Glass a CD of twenty-five instrumentals, and Glass chose to record vocals for five of them. They were both into noise music and formed Crystal Castles to produce a new style of noise that didn't involve using guitars but rather dance music elements and electronic keyboards.
In 2013, Crystal Castles was number 477 on NME's list of " The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time."Įthan Kath and Alice Glass first met each other in the summer of 2004 while doing community service at the center for the blind.
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Many professional critics had complimentary opinions towards the album, one writer for Delusions of Adequacy calling it "one of the best electronic albums of the year." The record ranked in the top 20 on numerous year-end lists by publications such as Pitchfork, NME, and PopMatters and landed on lists of the best albums of the 2000s by NME and Complex. It also charted in Australia, France, Ireland, Scotland and the United Kingdom. Some professional music journalists highlighted its random and unpredictable nature as well as its unique style and sound.Ĭrystal Castles was released on March 18, 2008, by Lies Records and Last Gang Records, and sold well enough in the United States to make its way onto Billboard such as Independent Albums, Top Dance/Electronic Albums, and Top Heatseekers. This inspired the two to start a project that made noise music, but instead of guitars, they would use electronic sounds made with a circuit-bent Atari 5200, which led multiple journalists to describe their genre of music as a chiptune style they did not intend it to be categorized as.Ĭrystal Castles is a compilation of sold-out singles that made the duo famous internationally, as well as unreleased demos recorded in 2004 and three new cuts produced for the album: "Untrust Us, "Courtship Dating," and "Tell Me What to Swallow." The content on the LP includes samples of tracks from acts such as Death from Above 1979, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Luciano Berio, Drinking Electricity, and Van She. The two met each other in 2004 and both had an interest in noise music acts like AIDS Wolf & The Sick Lipstick. Crystal Castles is the debut studio album by Canadian electronic music duo Crystal Castles at the time of its release, the group consisted of producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass.