If you’ve ever asked a band, “Where are they now?” the answer is often “on Kickstarter.” The most fervent adopters of crowdfunding tend to be neither the multimillionaire likes of Amanda Palmer and Zach Braff or the scrappy starter bands that give good testimonial, but acts who’ve fallen off the news cycle but have kept enough of a core fanbase to pay for an album. In a sense this is rather cheery, offering established artists a graceful way into a mid- to late-career of house shows, hangouts, and folksy patronage; but for better and worse, that career becomes self-contained. While the larger campaigns tend to be the proof of the concept before a promotional storm, and the smaller ones are either lotto tickets or popular enough that the bands would probably have gotten snapped up soon anyway, the rest usually end up making their Kickstarters their entire promo and distribution cycle. The music, if it’s released, exists inside walled gardens: by fans alone, for fans alone. Even Palmer’s album, for all its heaped-on importance and accompanying megabytes of grumbling or praise, was mostly heard by her devotees.
Which is all to explain how what’s for all intents and purposes the sixth Ladytron album was conceived, funded, and released this year through Pledge Music to their least ado in years: there’ve been the standard lyric sheets and signed merch as well as shoes, a bikini, and even a 1998 Rover Cooper Mini Sport (“rust in usual areas”) on offer, but almost no press. It’s strange Crystal World is billed as Helen Marnie, Ladytron’s lead vocalist, but between returning producer Daniel Hunt (as well as Keren Ann collaborator Bardi Johannsson) and the downcast synthscapes he creates, it’d be believable as a successor to 2011’s relatively sedate Gravity the Seducer, which wasn’t as zeitgeisty as Witching Hour but hardly obscure. It’s a bit of a curiosity: an admitted pop move that makes no plays at a pop audience and that’s mostly midtempo, like a Ladytron album composed entirely of their ballads. Even the title sounds closed off.
What’s striking is how even an album so insular in distribution and in sound, is nevertheless conversant with trends; a surprising number of boxes get checked. Single “The Hunter”, the most Ladytron-like track here, is a rippling bit of Moroder by Hunt; if it weren’t for the gentle lilt or Witching Hour melody of the chorus, it could be anyone’s sequencer mania. Vaguely political “Sugarland” is the kind of 80s pop ballad with swooning backing vocals that everyone’s trying to write this year, backed with the shoegazey guitars and synths they’ve tried to reproduce for longer. There’s a slightly sullied chanson in “Violet Affair”, a reverb-swept song named “Laura” about someone close enough to Laura Palmer (after a dye job here, but demise and affairs intact), a sprawling, M83-ish set closer in “Hearts on Fire” (which doesn’t actually close Crystal World; the sequencing is a bit off).
But while Crystal World’s material is generally strong, and timely enough, as an album it’s a subdued entry. Ladytron’s best albums worked because Mira Aroyo’s tracks provided a steelier, tenser contrast to Marnie’s more plainspokenly ethereal sound. (This was part of the problem with Gravity the Seducer, all Marnie and all sedate.) Without a second voice, an album like this needs at least one standout single all the more; but while Marnie was responsible for those in Ladytron, there’s no “Destroy Everything You Touch” or “Ghosts” here. The closest is “The Hunter”, whose charms, while many, are muted; or “High Road", which is like Ladytron covering “Tainted Love” with a few riffs from “Like a Virgin”-- but not nearly as massive as that sounds; the production is far too diffident (one wonders what NIN and Velocifero’s Alessandro Cortini would have done with it) and the chorus hinges on “do you believe in love or rock and roll,” a lyric that’d be more convincingly delivered by basically anyone else.
If Crystal World isn’t a one-off, there are basically two ways Marnie can go. She could double down on the big synthpop singles and thus launch herself into a fast-crowding field, or-- perhaps more promising-- pursue the witchier, mythier direction suggested by “The Wind Breezes On” and “Submariner”, as haunting and crystalline as Marnie’s best material and better matches for her florid lyricism. Fortunately, if she does, these tend to be just the sort of detours less rewarded by the hype cycle than by patrons. Those, at least, Marnie has plenty of.
