aaamusic | On 17, Apr 2011

Crystal Stilts’ second album In Love With Oblivion is one of the more bizarre albums you’ll come across this year.  Dubbed noise pop (I have no idea what that is), the five member American band have created an album filled with decent enough vocals and some good work on the drums & guitar in particular, before deciding to turn the recording quality to crap in some attempt to sound different.  The band have managed to win some critical acclaim through this ‘innovative’ sound, however I don’t see how making a crap recording is supposed to differentiate you from the rest.

In fairness In Love With Oblivion is quite a good album and there are plenty of catchy elements in the album which get clouded by the recording.  The guitar throughout is brilliant, managing to sound so simple yet avoiding the pitfalls of sounding too much like someone else.  The guitar-led introductions on tracks like Invisible City & Through the Floor does show what Crystal Stilts have attempted to avoid, that they have commercial appeal & ultimately they’re not oh so different from indie groups like The Editors.  Almost all of the bands 11 track album offers up catchy riffs and toe-tapping drums, which begs the question why the hell they decided to ruin the record by making it more ‘noise-pop’ , or as our musical friend Wikipedia states ‘Dream-pop’.

It’s all well and good attempting to play music to fit to a genre, in fact in most cases it helps to define your sound and audience pretty early on.  But what Crystal Stilts have done is found their sound in indie pop and decided they want to be less successful and more underground so they made a recording that sounds like you’re standing outside a gig venue.  I’ve honestly made better recordings with a handheld video camera.  Check YouTube if you don’t believe me, though bear in mind the workings of my band Chronic Discharge were done when I was about 15.  The point I’m trying to make about Crystal Stilts is they had no reason to soil a good record; this would have been a decent leftfield indie album with a little fine tuning.  Yet instead what we’re left with is a band that played with the tools in a record studio for too long and got too big for their boots so they made up a style and a lame genre, and frankly the end result is more useless than a new Metallica album.  If Crystal Stilts get a hard faced record label boss and a decent producer, they might turn into something in the future.  Until then we’re all going to have to live in the fear of Crystal Stilts and their army of meaningless made up genres.

Author: Tom Crowther