Robust Castles

CD Choice: CRYSTAL CASTLES
Crystal Castles
Different/Last Gang
****

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the debut album from Toronto duo Crystal Castles is that it exists at all. Given the ease with which singer Alice Glass and multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath have built their rep with one-off tracks, remixes and collaborations that are distributed online almost as soon as they're finished, there's something a mite old-fashioned about getting a plastic disc containing a selection of tracks from that particular body of work into your hands.

Of course, conventional theories and practices have rarely come out in the wash when analysing the Toronto duo's work and ethos. Instead, much has been said about the band recycling old-school video game clips to use in recalibrated synths. Such innovation has produced a sometimes radical raft of mutant squelches and squawks, which has become the band's signature tune.

The duo's low-key approach to promotion has added to their allure. Yet the more you listen to this collection of restless, jumpy and twitchy tracks - their greatest bytes, in other words - the more you notice robust songs and stone-cold beautiful melodies beneath the surface. For all the talk of electronic shape-shifting (and even the unfinished, untidy nature of

their sound in places as they scramble to sort it all out), Crystal Castles know that abandoning arrangements and structures will only result in earache and mild forms of irritation.

With sounds often reminiscent of both the brutal electronics that powered early acid house tracks and the more naive side of early electropop, Crystal Castles produce wave after wave of alien, distorted and mesmerising grooves. Both Air Warand the throbbing, bobbing dash of Untrust Usare bookends for how the Castles work, while their approximation of Los Angeles band Health's Crimewaveslips and slides from an eclectic soundclash into a bloody clatter of edgy noise. The possibilities are endless. www.myspace.com/crystalcastles
JIM CARROLL
Download tracks: Untrust Us, Air War, Crimewave