Crystal Stilts – Alight of Night Review

28 November 2008, Allan @ 8:00 pm Crystal Stilts Alight of Night Review

The Crystal Stilts are from Brooklyn and one of their members, Frankie Rose was a former member of the Vivian Girls. Other then that, I know very little about this band but I was given the chance to check out their album, “Alight Of Night” and I’ve gotten the chance to listen to it for the last few weeks.

Being the type to mention some type of general classification, Crystal Stilts make some sort of shoegaze-pop and the leadsinger sounds a lot like Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields.

I am not sure if I’m a fan of shoegaze personally, however I do enjoy a lot of the blending on guitar effects and the vocal melodies of the lead singer. There’s an emphasis on the artistry of the musicians, which in this case is top notch.

While it’s not too difficult to see that some of these songs are quite simple in nature (aside from the guitar work/effects), a lot of the songs have a catchy nature to them right off the bat. The first song I really enjoyed was the self-titled track name, Crystal Stilts with a simple guitar riff and some keyboarding that kicks in half way make this a rather enjoyable song. My next favorite track is “Shattered Shine” which follows the same pattern for under 3 minutes. The next track I really liked was “Prismatic Room”, which I actually like for the vocals. The leadsinger (who I don’t know the name of so I just won’t get it wrong) does a great job here making an awesome noise-dream pop track.

There are many good tracks on this album and like my previous album review today, it again does not have as strong of a replay value as I would like. I was incredibly high on this album at one point, thinking that it may be a candidate for my top albums of the year but it came clear it’s a notch below that level.

I think one of the main reasons it doesn’t have a good replay value is that the tracks do a wonderful job of disguising a track that is simple in nature but sounds incredibly artistic initially. Still, to say they aren’t artistic at all is not justified in the least and they do make a decent album with some very good songs and at least made an attempt to experiment.

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