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Album Reviews
Album Review: Crystal Stilts – Alight Of Night (Angular Records)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 February 2009
Already superstars-in-the-making in their home borough of Brooklyn (and why wouldn’t they be?), Crystal Stilts start the year with the release of their highly anticipated full-length LP, ‘Alight Of Night’. With a performance at 2008’s CMJ under their belts and a respectable legion of hipster fans behind them, the dark-psychedelia retro-ites are apparently taking nu-gaze and banal, minimalistic garage rock to another level. All cynicism put to the side, ‘Alight Of Night’ is a dark piece of work emerging from the same place that fellow Brooklynites A Place To Bury Strangers reared their noisy little faces, and there’s little doubt they will tire of comparisons to the likes of Joy Division and The Jesus And Mary Chain. At a mere thirty-five minutes, ‘Alight Of Night’ is a rumbling half hour of static, angular noise pushed sluggishly through a crackling amplifier; ‘Crystal Stilts’ (was the band named after the song, or the song after the band?) is a delicious mix of surf rock and psychobilly wound down after a few shots of bourbon, ‘Verdant Gaze’ sounds like the Lou Reed slow-dancing with Sharin Foo, and ‘Prismatic Room’ is lethargic and cool with its jangling, psychedelic organ melody. The kind of record that will split a room (metaphorically, of course), ‘Alight Of Night’ is better after its second play, if only to catch the intricacies and small, delicate efforts that Crystal Stilts have put a lot of work into – a lot of work, it seems, to sound lazy. TW
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