Live Performance Review: Crystal Castles, Monday 26.11.2012, 19:00, O2 A.B.C., Glasgow

I feel the Castles are the hardest to try to explain why I like them so much. It had just been by chance that I had first heard them, as had the 2011 N.M.E. awards playing in the background late one eve, leading me to purchase the album the following day as I had loved what I had heard. This area of music is quite alien to me. Apart from Grimes which I greatly enjoy and I had checked out out of curiosity. Grimes is a lot more mainstream & poppy electronica. Though that is the extent of my knowledge of this area, so I don't really feel as though I have the language to discuss this in terms of genre.

There was a support group of no note upon entering the venue, then a D.J set which was insignificant, then a further period of agresive hippity-hop being blasted through the P.A. system, before the Castles took to the stage. The one criticism I would have of the concert was that there felt to be too long with nothing happening on the stage between the initial support group and Castles coming on. They could have been on sooner had the roadies made better use of the empty stage.

Once they were on stage it was incredible. The crowd were fevered, and the performance was intense. I have never seen a better use of lighting; the control and precision in relation to the music was staggering. The visual affect felt genuinely hypnotic. The communication/relationship between the audience and Alice Glass, the vocalist was like a leader and their followers. The amount of times she would be carried vertical above the audience, was hard not to be impressed by.

This was a date from their tour in support of their new album, (III), which was released on the Fiction label on 07.11.2012.. I had enjoyed the last album (II) which had a high rate of stand out tracks, though this one feels more complete. The overall tone feels more blissed, though there is still an unnerving undercurrent; I have a sense that without this it would not feel like the Castles. The whole album feels to have a very high quality to it in terms of what the Castles do, without single weak track.

For those who don't know the Castles, I describe them as dark electronica, though Wikipedia call it electronic experimental. They are not a group I would commonly recommend, as the overall tone would put many off. There is something about how the vocal is treated along with the unrelenting rhythm that I find quite enveloping.

The only possible quibble would be that it would have been nice for their performance to have been slightly longer, though given the frenetic nature of the performance, this may have been asking a bit much. I remember a performance of Rage Against The Machine at the Glasgow Barrowlands in 1996 lasting a similar length, which it goes without saying was very intense, and I had no issue about the length of the performance then.

Rating: CONCERT (10/10)//ALBUM (10/10).