Live Review: CRYSTAL CASTLES 27/11/12

Unabashedly throwing up on stage, puffing on a spliff amidst rumbling synthesisers, leaping boldly into the ocean of an audience. Such were the antics of Alice Glass, vocalist of the Canadian experimental electronic duo, Crystal Castles, who wreaked havoc in the intimately-sized Leeds O2 Academy. Glass, alongside songwriter and instrumentalist, Ethan Kath, sojourned to the UK to promote their newest album, III, released only 15 days earlier. Notorious for their riotous, frenzied shows, Crystal Castles did not disappoint: engulfing the hungry crowd in their nihilistic medley of rich, deep synthesisers with glitchy 8-bit confusion, unified also with the piercing, unintelligible shrieks of manic Alice Glass.

The pair emerged from the smoky, sinister miasma onto the stage to the reverberating echoes of ‘Plague’, the first track from their new album. The initial slow-moving pulses of the synths filtering in, coupled with the mechanically manipulated voice of Glass were more than enough to galvanise the audience; hysteria ensued when the beat finally dropped – high-tempo drumbeats and intense red strobe-lights only the backdrop to Glass’s garbled vocals. Next was ‘Baptism’, a sure anthem of CC, featuring an idiosyncratic multitude of musical dimensions; an 8-bit simplicity that was redolent of their earliest releases, corrosive, haunting synths, and Glass, thrashing and convulsing onstage almost mesmerisingly, wailing at the enraptured throng at her feet.

Glass demonstrated a varied array of vocal ability in lighter songs, such as ‘Suffocation’ and ‘Crimewave’, as well as ejecting much of her stomach’s contents in between – perhaps an act of grotesque subversion. For the instrumental, ‘Telepath’, Glass gave her fiery vocals a rest, and joined Kath behind the myriad of keys and knobs of the duo’s setup, uniting to re-create one of the more melodic, jaunty tracks of III, all the while nonchalantly smoking a joint. What followed was ‘Alice Practice’, the song that first thrust Glass and Kath into stardom; its raw, glitchy Nintendo-seizures elicited a sentiment of nostalgia amongst the otherwise rabid audience.

Interestingly, Kath incorporated a remixed version of Huoatron’s ‘Cryptocracy’ into the setlist; the song’s pulsating, incessant bleeps and the strobe lights bombarding the stage surreally portraying the dishevelled Kath as an overlord, glaring disdainfully at the servile crowd intermittently.

After the crowd-pleaser, ‘Not In Love’, to which the crowd’s voices drowned out Glass’s, the encore followed, a minute of two of respite before Glass and Kath returned to perpetuate an already stellar, perturbing show. The gig culminated with ‘Intimate’ – a synthed instrumental, fast-paced song; Glass vaulting herself into the ravenous crowd, desiring to make a lasting impression upon the mob that so voraciously devoured her and Kath’s performance.