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CC also sparked a mini-riot among rabid fans moved to trash a Rough Trade record shop after a rowdy in-store performance in London, all the while remaining oddly distanced from the internationally renowned Canadian indie scene from whence they sprang. Within a year, Crystal Castles had graduated from touring the States via Greyhound bus to headlining status in the U.K., landing remix duties for Bloc Party, Liars and their pals, the Klaxons.

We were just excited that our seven-inches had sold out, just happy about that alone." "We got there and a week later they'd signed to Polydor. You know what happened with them, right? At the time, that was just all new things happening," says Kath. to discover that the Klaxons had just got a record deal. label Merok Records, an imprint launched by the roommate of a then-unknown British band called the Klaxons.īy the time Kath and Glass accepted an invite from Merok to tour the U.K., both their single and its predecessor by those same Klaxons – who would go on to win the 2007 Mercury Prize the following year for their album Myths of the Near Future – had sold out completely. And so Crystal Castles subsequently agreed to issue "Alice Practice" as just the second seven-inch released by upstart U.K. Suddenly, though, he was fielding frantic offers from three separate labels to release it as a single. Kath posted the tune online merely as a means of proving to his friends that he was, in fact, still alive after vanishing into the studio for months with Glass on a shared whim to build a noise-rock band in the vein of Toronto's Sick Lipstick or Montreal's AIDS Wolf that substituted mutilated, analogue keyboard sounds for guitars. Take care of yourselves, Crystal Castles, because this is most definitely your moment.īlog-age notoriety has accrued so quickly and so furiously for the twosome that it was being hyperbolized overseas last year as "the most exciting and original band in the world right now" based largely upon the momentum gained from a single tune, "Alice Practice," that was, as legend has it, surreptitiously created – "by accident," if you will – when the engineer presiding over Crystal Castles' first demo sessions in April of 2005 hit "record" while Glass wailed her way through a preparatory microphone check. Every time she coughs, she's holding her stomach in pain. "That was the first show Alice did with her broken ribs, so we played four songs and she was, like, `That's it,'" says Kath.

So if the hugely hyped performance wound up proving necessarily brisk, at least Glass and Kath observed a golden rule of show business by curtly walking offstage after about 20 minutes while a packed, thoroughly wound-up houseful of admirers gasped for more. We didn't know what was going on."ĭespite her doctor's advice to take five or six weeks off, Glass – a diminutive banshee who is nevertheless so shy offstage that she's rumoured to burst into tears before shows – was back at it for the band's March 14 SXSW date at storied Austin venue Emo's.Ī painful move, but no doubt a beneficial one, since there was a lineup snaking down 6th Avenue well before the doors opened, waiting expressly for Crystal Castles to kick off the evening's lineup. "We were at the venue waiting for her till, like, seven in the morning. We didn't even know," says keyboard maestro and beatmaker Ethan Kath, who stages a homecoming gig with Glass this Friday at Circa. "After the show, she went for a drive with a friend and someone smashed into them. The word "accidental" has already appeared so much in Crystal Castles lore that it seems a rather bitter irony that an actual, real-life accident has now thrust itself into what is, arguably, the Toronto duo's first crucial North American tour.įive shows into the pair's current five-week road swing – timed to give Crystal Castles' eponymous debut album a little pre-release juicing at Austin's all-important South by Southwest festival the weekend before its official arrival in stores last Tuesday – pixieish singer Alice Glass wandered off from a gig in Chicago early this month and wound up breaking a couple of ribs when the car she was riding in collided with another vehicle.