Crystal Stilts have always been ahead of the contemporary indie pop learning curve. When most of their peers were products of the widely beloved C86 tape in 2008, the Brooklyn quintet was namedropping the Clean cofounder David Kilgour's the Great Unwashed. The components that make their sound are fastidiously plucked from early-1980s Manchester (Joy Divison) and New Zealand (the Clean, the Chills), late-1960s New York (the Velvet Underground), and-- in cases including but not limited to singer Brad Hargett's hair-- early Bob Dylan. But influence doesn't mean anything if it's not siphoned into something worthwhile, and Crystal Stilts do much more than sit on their first-edition copies of Flying Nun vinyl and collect cool points.
Their debut album Alight of Night found them firing off shimmering guitar lines and then simmering into a thick haze, alternating between sunny afternoon clang and after-hours sulk. Using his voice as another instrument instead of a vehicle for dynamic singing or pseudo-profound lyrical messages, Hargett's deep baritone blends low into the mix, the use of reverb rivaling that of an epic fantasy movie narrator. The album was used as the foundation for this year's In Love With Oblivion, though that newer collection was a fuller-sounding affair, more urgent in places ("Shake the Shackles"), more daring in others ("Alien Rivers"), and filled with pop tunes brimming with life from corner to corner. Crystal Stilts are a band that doesn't have much use for empty space-- most of the silence gets chased away by the blasts of trebly volume.
Radiant Door is not a radical departure from that default sound; its Kilgour Brothers-indebted style makes it safe to assume kiwi is still the most important item on their tour rider. But not all groups have to rely on the benefit of reinvention. The non-vocalists of Crystal Stilts are incredibly good at adding a Technicolor flair, crafting arrangements so colorful that they often veer into kaleidoscopic territory. Two of the five songs on the EP feature the quintet nakedly putting its record collection at the forefront of its consciousness, this time in the form of recorded covers. The band's take on Blue Orchids' "Low Profile" is a key example of this; it's faithful enough to the original to be recognizable, but the Stilts' heavy lifting-- as it mostly always does-- comes from keyboardist Kyle Forester and guitarist/co-songwriter JB Townsend, the former turning in a simple-but-catchy three-note riff, the latter sounding like he's been planting Joshua Trees around Brooklyn.
The EP's other cover, Lee Hazlewood's "Still as the Night", finds the band in spaghetti-western outlaw mode, exploring a style they've heretofore never tried. The song is spare in a way that's uncommon to the band. It doesn't quite work with a singer like Hargett, whose booming voice (that sometimes wavers in and out of key) is far more suited to weathering the band's stormier moments than trying to fill in gaps. Though "Still as the Night" is a good song that falls just short of being great, it doesn't stall the band-- they've always been adept at playing to their strengths, and the rest of the EP's 21 minutes are full of gleaming keyboard lines and jangly guitars casting sun on everything in sight. For a band that has proven it can do darkness just as well, Radiant Door is exactly as its title suggests-- the brighter side of one of America's best psych-pop bands.
