It's not often that you put on an album and within a few bars of the first track you ask (often involuntarily out loud) "What the fuck is this?" It is rarer still that you utter said line in awe, rather that disgust. Alight of Night is one of these highly rare cases. The track in question is 'The Dazzled', the opener from the second album from Brooklyn's Crystal Stilts. The driving bass-line is purposeful and ghostly vocals of Brad Hargett give the band a darkness and removes them from any immediately obvious musical era. There are definite touches of 60s psychedelia, at other times they sound like The Jesus & Many Chain, The Velvet Underground and even occasionally remind you of Suicide.
The music is so dark, and incredibly dense. Every track is like a huge impenetrable sonic block that refuses to just reduce it to background noise. ‘Departure', for instance, is laced with reverb-tastic organ riffs and pure surf guitar. It's like Dick Dale soundtracking a scene from Taxi Driver.
Although they make this fantastic sound, it often means that the lyrics are difficult to pick out. A shame, but I will probably go with the idea that what is being said is less important than how. Even without being able to fathom the lyrics, this album still manages to engage you emotionally, which is further testament to how good the music itself actually is.
It appears that the band is often horribly misrepresented as "shoegaze", which implies that they sound like a bunch of whiny, miserable wankers. This is really doing them a disservice, as they actually have some seriously gorgeous melodies buried deep inside the dark maelstroms of these 11 tracks. What is slightly annoying, however, is that 4 of the tracks are taken from their eponymously titled EP which came out last year, making this more like 2 EPs glued together than one standalone album. However, it does not make the album any less cohesive, it would just have been nice to have 11 new tracks. Just a small criticism of a generally great album.
I fully accept that not everyone will fall for this album as quickly and as completely as I did. It's complicated, dense and subtle all at the same time. However, anyone who affords it a little bit of patience will be eventually come to the realisation that Crystal Stilts have produced one of the best albums of the year so far.
