“Crimewave”/”My Baby Left Me”

Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH – “Crimewave”

Eyes lit
On sharp threats
From dark lips

But lights press
The soft skin
To rough hands.

Alice Glass’s voice, like that of the Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson, is merely a suggestion for Crystal Castles, a flesh-and-blood formation to digitally gild, deconstruct and rebuild. We don’t hear her sing the word “hands”, we hear nine diced-up jabs at “hands”, varying slightly in pitch, like a lilting melisma fed through a dot-matrix printer. “Soft” isn’t soft at all. Halfway through the one-syllable word, it becomes an inclement two-syllable word, suddenly shifting into what sounds like syntax-error feedback for its second half. It’s the same sort of binary-based aesthetic amputation performed on a sliver of Ethan Kath’s left shoulder.

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Rox – “My Baby Left Me“

Ah, ooooooooo-uu-oohh yeah!

The soul beneath Rox’s sweet shout sounds like the product of peak-era Motown labor division–each piece molded with micro-level human care and macro-level cold precision. The excerpted vocal above is no exception: it only distantly exhibits characteristics that one would instantly recognize as “human.” Like the studio-constructed self-choir Stevie Wonder made of his own impossibly keening falsetto on the middle eight of “We Can Work It Out” (2:08 to 2:15), this background holler is chrome. Most crucially is the break in the middle of the “Ah, oooooooo” part. It’s the quick-hiccup sort of modification that most would identify with record-scratching, but there’s no “scratch” sound present. Just a frozen microsecond of space, like gleaming side-panel detail work temporarily interrupted by the gap where the door opens.

Filed under: Crystal Castles  Rox