ccIII

here's another example of an album being better than the sum of its parts.

i didn't have high hopes when i first saw that crystal castles had released a new album within what felt to me like a short period of time.

their 2 previous albums had some hugely popular hit songs (listen to celestica, for example) but also a lot of noisy shitty songs that appeared out of nowhere and seemed to serve no purpose. the albums seemed to be just made of random songs thrown together and everything was all over the place.

like whenever i listened to crystal castles II, the second track was celestica, one bloody amazing song, and it was followed by doe deer, one bloody awful and noisy shit song that would without fail, make me shut off the entire album.

it was so bad that i think i've made it past track 3 only less than a handful of times.

so this new album, i found it on youtube and played it one night. i figured i would identify the hit songs and skip past all the shitty ones that would inevitably appear.

therefore it came as a bit of a surprise that there were no hit songs that caught my ear immediately. it was a bigger surprise that there were no shitty songs too! the entire album seemed to tie together very well and felt much stronger than the previous ones.

it reminded me a little of the xx's album coexist, which i wrote about late last year. bright and coherent and somehow it feels better that there are no obvious hit songs that would tend to cause you to anticipate their arrival while ignoring the other songs.