The Crystal Stilts are moody-sounding fuckers who make fabulous stripped-down garage-pop. Their mix-and-match post-punk ditties manage to sound both affected and effective at the same time; they're weirdly life-affirming and very fun. You want to dance when you hear them-- dance with a furrowed brow, maybe, but move around nonetheless. Singer Brad Hargett is from Brooklyn by way of Florida but sounds like he's from Manchester by way of Slough. The main thing I wonder when I listen to Crystal Stilts is why is it so hard to make exceptional garage-pop like this? I mean, how hard can it be to plonk out a little la-la-loo-lee number on your $80 Sears guitar or your beat-up Casio and then record the thing in the bathroom in one take? It's been stated in ways both eloquent (David Fair's brilliant and oft-quoted manifesto "How to Play Guitar") and cheesy as heck (Bono's "three chords and the truth" which he lifted from Harland Howard re: Hank Williams), but should it not by definition be simple to do this?
Of course it is not. Rock'n'roll is theft-- all the great ideas have been recycled a thousand one times already. So to hit upon a winning combination of old and new gets harder than coming up with a band name that doesn't return hundreds of hits when you plug it into the old Google. (I have to say that I wish another band had already called themselves Crystal Stilts already, as the name outright blows-- plus what's with the mini-plague of Crystal bands?) Self-limiting is the key to great garage-pop: By keeping it stripped-down on purpose-- whether you're the Saints ca. 1975 or Beat Happening ca. their whole career-- you unleash something greater than yourself. This is the Oulipian ideal, that one can free the subconscious by making oneself a drone to either the obvious or to seemingly haphazard rules. It's also partly why La Monte Young is punk as fuck-- but you know that already.
Crystal Stilts do not sound like the Saints or Beat Happening or La Monte Young. These are weird pop songs you clap your hands along to. They pile a rockabilly riff and nursery school melodies onto a revved-up bass line and sweet surfy 60s organ riff on top of minimalist percussion on the song "Crystal Stilts". The amazing "Crippled Croon" takes the stand-up drum roll from "Just Like Honey" and grafts echoed-up vocals, a reverb-swallowed guitar, and a sub-atomic bass line onto it. And "Shattered Shine", with its psychedelic layers of tambourine, guitar, and organ, is a perfect marriage of Ian Curtis-y doom with sunshine-y Shop Assistants-style pop. The Stilts sing in fake Brit-sounding accents, but somehow the dude's droll, goth-y croon never grates; it helps that the band pushes his vocals way low in the mix.
In what little press the band has gotten, they've been compared to New Zealand bands. I feel that a lot of this alleged New Zealand copping has been pasted onto the Stilts because it was Clean drummer/singer Hamish Kilgour who helped to "discover" and help the group out. It's worth pointing out that in the 80s themselves, many American acts were greatly influenced by NZ groups. It was the late 80s, of course (and on into the early 90s), but acts as beloved today as Pavement and Neutral Milk Hotel-- as well as currently obscure acts such as World of Pooh and Wingtip Sloat-- would have sounded a lot different if they hadn't been buying up every Flying Nun record they could get their hands on back in the day. Some folks complain that they cannot understand Brad Hargett's lyrics, but pop lyrics are typically a disappointment. Burying them is actually a winning strategy, and it's a safe bet that this is intentional-- that Crystal Stilts are aesthetes and are doing this because they also like records that sound this way. Either that, or the Stilts are broke as shit.
