Crystal Castles
(II) (a.k.a. We’re Too Busy Being So Fucking Hip To Bother Giving Our Albums Real Names, Just Like Weezer)
Fiction Records
Hi, I’m Meathead. I just found out about this new album by my favorite band Crystal Castles, and I’m really excited about it because I love mopey, whiny adolescents who wear hoodies and skinny jeans, and I also enjoy skull-splitting migraine headaches. So, naturally, when I found out that someone actually let my favorite band Crystal Castles back into a studio so that whatever that ugly girl’s name is Alice Glass could once again scream a bunch of unintelligible horseshit with the microphone practically shoved up against her epiglottis, you’d better believe I was all over that shit like white on a Vampire Weekend concert.
I confess I was a little worried that, in the two years since my favorite band Crystal Castles’ last offering, that other dork Ethan Kath might have inadvertently learned something about music theory, song structure, chord progression, or at least a basic general sense of what actually does and doesn’t sound good, but as soon as the first track started playing, those fears were immediately put to rest. I don’t know how they did it, but “Fainting Spells” miraculously captures the very sound of brain cells suffocating to death.
Much like their previous effort, the “music” is sort of the audio equivalent of the infinite monkey theorem. If an infinite number of monkeys are pressing infinite buttons and turning infinite knobs in infinite recording studios for an infinite length of time, the idea is that eventually they will produce an exact copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The unlistenable dreck they crank out in the meantime, however, would probably sound just like my favorite band Crystal Castles.
It’s difficult to comment on individual tracks on their own merit, as the omnipresent 4/4 beats, shrill gibberish and grotesquely distorted Sega Genesis music all tends to run together into one large, amorphous glob of pointless unpleasantness. A few songs, like “Celestica,” verge on almost being a real song (in the same sense that Chef Boyardee is real food), while the others, like the redundantly titled “Doe Deer,” rank in listenability somewhere between the sound of 400 dial-up modems from 1997 connecting to AOL simultaneously and Fran Drescher being skinned alive with a potato peeler.
In case that isn’t enough to make you rush out and legally purchase this album from your local record store, there is also a track called “Pap Smear.” It’s really too bad I can never understand a single word this girl is singing, because I’d really love to know what this particular song is all about.
I know it may seem like this is a negative review, but I assure you it’s not. Truly, it fills my heart with joy to see bright young privileged little shits like these two realizing their dreams without letting such minor hindrances as a complete and utter absence of anything even scarcely resembling natural talent stand in their way. By demonstrating that you really can get by simply by pretending to know what you’re doing, Alice Gloss and Nathan Keth are a shining light to aspiring posers everywhere, both young and old.
