The tower and the glory

Something strange is going down at Andrew’s Lane tonight. In the early summer gloom, neon-festooned kids have congregated outside the city-centre Dublin venue. Wearing day-glo hoodies and Converse slip-ons, many could have come straight from a nu rave fashion shoot. They’re here for a sold-out show by Crystal Castles, the buzz propelled Toronto twosome whose glitchy, woozy synth-weirdness is presently lighting up the blogosphere.

Spread-eagled in a pokey upstairs room above the recently refurbished former theatre, Ethan Kath, the bearded half of the duo, appears vaguely stunned by the turn out.
“When we heard that it was sold-out we were totally psyched,” says Kath. “You know, we’ve been doing this for two years now and it still hasn’t sunk in. We’re still living in a dreamland.”
A rangy dude with scraggy curls and Jesus-goes-surfing facial fuzz, Kath is leery of Crystal Castle’s nu rave tag. You can see where he’s coming from – on their self-titled debut, he and partner Alice Glass conjure eerie, throbbing synthscapes, languid quasi-instrumentals awash with 8-bit Nintendo beats and waves of dissonance. If this is nu rave, then Mozart was a guy from the Alps who could bash out a tune on a harpsichord.
For the past ten minutes or so, we’ve been talking about Glass’ recent car accident, which left her in a cast and forced the band to cancel nearly a fortnight of touring. In hindsight, it could, says Kath, have been a great deal worse.
“We were playing Chicago and after the show she was driving with a girlfriend – a pal of hers, you know. The show ends, we pack our gear. It’s three in the morning and we’re thinking – where is she? It’s five and we’re thinking, where is she? Seven in the morning, we finally get the call – she’s in hospital. It really sucked. It was really depressing.”
Like a deleted scene from a Robert Altman movie, the story of Kath and Glass’ first meeting is fraught with coincidences and drama. “We were both in trouble with the law,” he recounts. “I was in a heavy metal band and I got in trouble. I couldn’t cross the border to play in the States. I was doing everything in my power to clean my record. I hired this criminal lawyer – he said I could convince the judge to erase it if I did 50 hours of community service.”
So it was that Kath found himself reading to blind people at a Toronto day-care centre.
“Alice was there doing the same thing. We ended up talking because we were the only ones there who were the same age. Everyone else was retired – wasting time before they died. We were shocked to discover we both loved the same obscure metal groups. She invited me to a show by her band one night. All her lyrics were amazing. I thought she was like a poet. This was in 2004. She was like, 15 years old at the time.”
Kath and Glass knew they were destined to make music together. There was just one problem: Kath was already in a band, a metal crew poised for the big time.
“Things were going really well,” he recalls. “We were going to get signed to Atlantic – we were opening this tour for Motorhead. I just stopped caring. I didn’t believe in it anymore. I was sick of of what we were doing – so many other bands were doing it.”
Without so much as a farewell text message to his bandmates, Kath dropped off the face of the planet. Holing up in a freezing Toronto warehouse, he and Glass started to put together spectral dance tunes – songs mired in twitching tempos and shot through with art-house weirdness.
“I had a whole crew of people from my own band who thought I was crazy ‘cos I left when things were going so well. They thought I’d died. I was obsessed with Crystal Castles. Like fucking insane – I’d work 40 straight hours on tracks.”
He broke his silence 18 months later, posting several bleary demos on MySpace. One, ‘Alice Practice’, was a remixed recording of Glass muttering into her mic during a soundcheck. It became their first anthem.
“The studio owner taped us setting up for some reason. I edited the ten minute track down to two and a half minutes and put it on the internet. Just to prove to people that I wasn’t dead. We didn’t check our MySpace messages for a month. When I went back, there were three offers to put the record out.”
Plumping for London-based Planet Mu, Crystal Castles found themselves labelmates with nascent nu rave flagbearers Klaxons – then trading as Klaxons Not Centaurs. But they were determined not to be sucked into the scene Klaxons were starting to build.
“We’re not clubbers,” Kath stresses. “Alice is from the noise punk scene. I was from the heavy metal scene. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a club in my life.”
Several months ago Crystal Castles found themselves at the centre of a medium-level shitstorm when Timbaland allegedly sampled their ‘Courtship Dating’ for ‘Ayo Technology’, his stand-out contribution to 50 Cent’s last record. Though the duo are known to be irked by the sampling, they don’t comment on it, for fear of being tagged as the band that feuded with Timbaland. Off the record, Kath will speak at length about the subject. Officially, though, it’s a no-go zone.
He’s happier talking about the origins of Crystal Castles’ moniker, which, contrary to what the bloggerati might tell you, owes nothing to an ‘80s video game of the same name.
“It comes from a commercial. I never heard of the video game until people brought it up. It’s from She-Ra, the cartoon [a short lived He-Man offshoot with feminist undertones – ‘80s kids’ TV editor]. Crystal Castles is where She Ra lived. I’d never seen an episode of it. But there was a commercial I saw at my friend’s house – it ended with the line, ‘The fate of the world is safe in Crystal Castles.’ As soon as I heard that, I said to myself – ‘Then we’re Crystal Castles’.”

Crystal Castles is out now on Planet Mu.