Album Focus: Crystal Castles – 'Crystal Castles'

Hi, I'm Nate Lanxon and this is Encoded's Album Focus Show, where we take a closer look at one of the week's most interesting new releases.

Today we're going to be focusing on Canadian electro duo Crystal Castles, whose eponymous debut came out this week.

There's been a hell of a lot of praise heaped on Crystal Castles by the über-cool end of the music press, pronouncing them almost revolutionary in their warping of the electro genre, and though I wouldn't go as far as Loud and Quiet magazine who called Crystal Castles "the most exciting and original band in the world right now", there's no denying that they're a cut above your average electro tinkerers. In fact, they're a cut, a slash and a mutilation ahead of the pack.

The band is producer and programmer Ethan Kath, who plays and wrote all the music on the album, alongside vocalist Alice Glass, who shrieks and yelps her teenage poetry into a fuzzy microphone with increasingly distressing urgency.

Kath's style shifts and changes across the album, but always seems retro, be it for the early-nineties rave and gabba sounds he explores, or for the Atari 5200 soundchip, which turns his keyboard into an 8-bit prison cell. At the points where these styles collide, Crystal Castles are at their strongest, as fifth track 'xxzxczx me' shows. (I think you pronounce this 'excuse me'.)

If you're desperate for a Crystal fix right away, head over to spinner.com where you can download the amazing 'Crimewave' for free, and then over to their MySpace where their latest video 'Courtship Dating' is there for all to see.

That's it from me – see you later, internet.