Crystal Castles...

are a YouTube band...fun to listen to in the office, not so much on a cold Wednesday night at the Independent...

i don't know...it was really fun going to Bean Bag before the show, beers were drunk and pills were popped (the latter not by me)...it was cute, i felt like my old raver self circa 1996...haven't talked that much about "e" in over a decade...but then the show...whatever...i'll put it to you like this...if it was a show it was a shitty one...unless you count a DJ spinning tech-House a "show"...cause that's kind of what Crystal Castles are all about...tech-House...if this was a "party" (where you would expect to hear tech-House) it would have been a lame one...everyone was standing around looking at the stage...but nothing was really happening on stage besides Alice Glass chirping into a mic/jumping around with a strobe light...um, boring...

the old school raver in me is bitter...i'm sorry but it's just too fucking early to repackage House music and call it Electro or "Rave"...i like House music but not as a show...i like dancing to good House but not watching it spun on a stage...tech-House treated as spectacle is baffling...maybe i was just the oldest person there (but i wasn't)...maybe everyone forgot about the 90's (but they didn't)...maybe House music has such a corny connotation to the majority of 20'somethings that in order to sell it to the urban masses they need to call it Electro (but they shouldn't, cause it's not)...

the friends on pills looked slightly bored, didn't know you could be bored on "e" but they seemed it...i felt bad for them...we hugged our cute little e-tards goodbye about 4 songs (records) in...

on the other hand the opening band,Lymbyc Systym, were inspiring...twin brothers (?), one on drums (he was really ON drums) and one on keyboard/macbook...they played a seemless 45 minute set of huge landscape'y instrumental rock...it reminded me of Antarctica without the vocals...the sound was fucking head knocking, and layered, and hard, and gorgeous...kind of had that Boards of Canada time-lapse photography feel to it, like watching a flower blossom in slow motion on fast forward...i didn't want it to end...the crowd was polite but not necessarily enthusiastic...

here's a Lymbyc Systym live