The album artwork to Crystal Castle’s third album, tentatively titled (III) features an award winning photograph by Samuel Aranda of a woman clutching her son who has fallen victim to a tear gas bombing during a street protest in Sana’a, Yemen in 2011. The artwork proves to be eerily appropriate, once you reach the mid-point of opening track “Plague” it becomes easy to picture the track as the background music to any news footage of shit-hitting-the-fan.
Chaos seems to be a prominent theme on the album both in terms of music and content. Musically, the band brings electric beats that are produced through sampled “noise” while the songs bear titles like “Plague”, “Kerosene”, “Violent Youth” and “Child I Will Hurt You.” The entire album is an angst-gasm, a soundtrack that would be fitting to the life and times of Lisbeth Salander.
Crystal Castles continue further on (III) to blend harsh electronic noise with pumping dance beats, a sound that has remained prominent and rather unchanging throughout their career. Some may be quick to say that the band’s sound has failed to grow and develop throughout their discography, but take into account that Ethan Kafe’s production surrounds around a genre referred to as chiptune. This is a genre that is defined by music that is produced from sampling sounds off of computers and video game systems (the band’s name itself is based off of a commercial for a toy spinoff of a 1983 videogame of the same name). It is a very focused genre that exists in a rather minimal realm.
With this in mind, it may be fair to say that to call for growth and reinvention in a band such as Crystal Castles would be in danger of missing the point. It is sometimes easy to forget that the concept of “vision” is circumstantial. The bands vision is fixed in its aural exploration through minimal means. Even on their last album when the band covered Platinum Blonde’s 1983 song “Not in Love” with The Cure’s Robert Smith at the vocal helm, the band took a track that was originally composed through traditional rock band instrumentation and reworked it with thrashing noise and big dance synth beats that reveled in XTC dropping, pacifier-sucking glory.
For anyone already familiar with the band, the songs on (III) may come as a surprise because they do not all continue in the style that the band has made its trademark. Alice Glass shows up in her usual intimidating demeanor on vocals, but there are moments where she almost appears to let her guard down (in a bleak manner of course.) “I’ll protect you from all the things I’ve seen” she croons (yes, croons) in a tone that keeps with the bands dark sound while adding a new level of emotion. “Child I Will Hurt You” could very well pass as a ballad by most standards, if it didn’t recall the bleakest of funeral dirges.
(III) proves to be an electronic album with clear focus and surprising depth concerning themes like human suffering and loss. Behind the electric noise and heavy bass there exists a bleeding heart that is surprisingly easy to feel empathy for.