_1290_860.jpg "crystal castles news")
Kath is a songwriter and producer of rare talent, someone who can write songs like Celestica or Year Of Silence that are so brilliantly melodic, so grippingly immediate, so joyously pop, that were they on the new Kylie Minogue album you would throw your hat into the air with the slightly edgy electro pleasure of it all. Outside this venue there are hundreds of young (and not-so-young) fans gathered hours before the doors open, and that's because Crystal Castles' new album – called, like their first, Crystal Castles – is a wonderful record that rides the noise/pop knife edge as well as anyone in the world. "Everywhere hates us the same." Except, of course, they don't. Do your fans react differently in different parts of the world, I smile? In an attempt to tease Friendly Ethan back out of the woodwork I go for the least contentious question imaginable. "There are music shops in every city in the world," offers the man who has built a (well-deserved) mythology on the uniqueness of his sounds and is famous for his hatred of preset technology. So if it all got burnt you wouldn't care? I'm not emotionally attached to any gear." And we're off! "Maybe the crew call it that," he says, "but I don't. "There's no such thing," he replies with a face like a four-year-old who's just been denied a lollipop.
CRYSTAL CASTLES NEWS FULL
Tell me about The Brain, I say, referring to the battered flight-case full of wounded, half-dead keyboards and old mobile phones that, apparently, provide a lot of the noise and vocal samples that the band use on stage. Ethan Kath slips into character and becomes "Ethan Kath out of Crystal Castles", someone who is, oh dear, quite capable of being a grumpy, uncommunicative, passive-aggressive arse. Then something sort of hilarious happens. So Glass appears, hair still wet, beaming smile, couldn't be more charming, and we sit down for the interview. When he offers to nip out and chase up Glass – she's having a shower, having just woken up at 6.30pm – I think to myself what a pleasure it is to meet him. He has a lot to say for himself, all of it interesting, and each story is delivered with the same engaging, garrulous enthusiasm. He tells me about how those links all lead to a version of the album that includes the wrong edit of future single, Celestica.
He tells me about how many links to illegal downloads of his new record there are on Twitter. He tells me about the band's old van (a decommissioned riot squad vehicle with "stab-proof" tyres) and how he had to get rid of his first drummer when the tub-thumper's ruinous liking for cocaine derailed a huge show in Tokyo.
CRYSTAL CASTLES NEWS WINDOWS
He tells me about the livestock and lack of windows on his grandfather's farm in Calabria (the southern-most "toe" in the Italian "boot"). He apologises for his hair being odd lengths (apparently Castles screamer Alice Glass cuts it when he's not looking). Anyway, there's nothing even slightly grumpy or uncommunicative about the 28-year-old in a black hoodie and skinny jeans I meet in the banana-yellow offices of a 1,000-capacity nightclub in an unattractive suburb of Milan.
0 kommentar(er)
