Crystal Castles at City Arts Fest: Where Witchrave Meets Just a Rave
Crystal Castles combined the same heavy effects of their live recordings with the spontaneity of a punk show Thursday night, launching a weekend of City Arts Fest. They weren't just there to play their hugest songs -- and "Alice Practice," oddly, had the lowest energy of the night -- although some seemed to be there to mostly hear "Not In Love," indicated by the crowd freaking out and by the conversations about The Cure I walked through after. Frontwoman Alice Glass maintained her composure and never missed a beat during her now-ubiquitous forays into the crowd; she's gained this practiced, stiff poise, similar to a ballerina during a lift.
While fans have gotten used to not grabbing her boobs, they still tried to descend upon her in an unsettling, almost cult-like way, her always being surrounded by a volcano of hands. Because of how cleanly Alice descended upon this desperate, fanatical audience, it began to look as if she were walking on water. The fanatical devotion began to border on unsettling. One boy about 17 said afterwards, "she held my hand for so long! It was the best moment of my life." On one hand, cute. On the other, she's a musician, not your fantasy girlfriend.
The audience was not beholden to one specific crowd; a cross-section of the city represented, from young punks to old punks, indie kids to kandi kids. The rave crowd meant that a ton of people were dancing; however, it also meant a lot of people were wearing string backpacks and LED blinking hats that were almost as abrasive as Showbox SODO's horrible LED stage lights. One girl had some glow poi balls that she busted out whenever she had a three-foot radius around her. Also present: a bizarre contingent of bros, which made me try, and fail, to picture Crystal Castles playing a frat party. Getting my judgey-face on became inevitable; it seemed like half the crowd was only there because of having some huge alt-boner. Either way, they all got rained on, because adding to the laundry list of problems with Showbox SODO is a leaky ceiling.
Despite the awkwardly large stage and abrasive lighting, Crystal Castles had enough moodiness to fill up the whole stage, with producer Ethan Kath rocking back and forth neurotically at the keyboards as Alice jumped from the floor to the drumkit to the crowd. Otherwise respectable performances local chilled-out goths Nightmare Fortress and Dumb Eyes-backed witchhouse outfit Crypts didn't make do with the space nearly as well, although the MS-Paint kaleidoscope visuals (likely the work of Dumb Eyes) were appreciated. The cardboard prism glasses that went out to the first 1,000 attendees (definitely the work of Dumb Eyes) were a nice touch, too:
Fancy glasses (and probably drugs) make the lights more tolerable!
While they'd stick to their hooks at the beginning of songs to keep the crowd amped, Crystal Castles deviated further and further from straight regurgitation of their catalog. "Untrust Us," most notably, started out as a haunting round of the Death From Above-inspired vocals between Ethan and Alice, and swelled, by the end, into a thudding jam resembing house music. The rave crowd's dancing became infectious, and soon the majority of the crowd was dancing.
At the end, though, they went back to their roots of "annoy[ing] you with the insides of old electronics" with just pulsating, electric noise, perfectly in sync with those abrasive, crowd-facing low LEDs for ten seconds for a brain-and-eyeball invading, well-transitioned and satisfying close. Nobody called for an encore.
