Review: Crystal Stilts - In Love With Oblivion

Artist: Crystal Stilts
Title: In Love With Oblivion
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Slumberland
Genre: Post-punk / noise pop
Rating: 59 / 100

Two days ago I wrote something about Idle Labor, Craft Spells' new album, a fairly decent example of how 80's revival mixed with modern influences can sound, I wasn't too enthousiastic about it, mainly because it just wasn't really my type of music. In this case we're dealing with a band who mixes some genres I like very much, first there's the typical 80's type of post-punk (think Joy Division), then there's some 60's Phil Spectorism, mixed with some jangly noise pop kind of thing (think Dum Dum Girls) and at last we have something that could best be described as shoegaze, even though it's the least explicit.

Three years ago, in late 2008, Crystal Stilts finally released their first real album, I say finally because they had been releasing EP's and singles since 2005. The first time I heard their debut album was somewhere in early 2010, and I have to admit that I wasn't really blown away by their sound, vocals nor songwriting. So, as a result expectations weren't very high when first reading there would be another album released this spring. That "another album" is entitled In Love With Oblivion and is exactly in line with what they let us hear on Alight of Night.

Crystal Stilts makes quite dark music, with little focus on melody, harmony or groove, vocals are rather low, sometimes even compared to Ian Curtis' style of singing. Someone who regularly reads this blog, might know I really love Joy Divison (there's even a poster of Ian Curtis above my desk), but Brad Hargett isn't really able to get me very warm with his vocals, like Ian does. The vocals lack a bit of clear melody and they often drown in all the reverb, normally I would say they are drenched in reverb, now they are mostly just drowning in reverb. Now, this sometimes isn't such a big deal, especially not when the music is very clear and has an explicit type of groove to it (like earlier mentioned Craft Spells), but Crystal Stilts' sound is fairly thin, making Brad's vocals sometimes an almost indistinguishable drone.

If one would take a look at the so widely spread interwebz, one would notice this album is received in a very positive way, often receiving ratings of 8 or even higher, even on "upperground" media like NME. Now I can understand why someone would enjoy this record, it really isn't that bad after all, but for me personally it just sounds way too thin, there are no lovely sugarsweet melodies, it feels even a bit suffocating at times, making it very hard for me to really enjoy this album. It has components of quite a lot of genres, but fails to really rise above what those genres have to offer seperately. The idea behind the music really has some potential to grow out to something very good, but In Love With Oblivion just doesn't reach that level.

Again, this album really isn't that bad, it's even quite decent at times (Sycamore Tree, Shake the Shackles), but still, the major part of the album was something I really couldn't get into. It might be pretty attractive to those who are devoted to this kind of dark sounding post-punk, mixed with some noise poppy guitar lines, I am just not one of those devotees.

Spread the purplefuzzyloveglow,

Selwin.