Perhaps it was only a matter of time until Crystal Castles redirected the anger they once reserved for the rest of the world toward each other. After singer Alice Glass quit the band due to "reasons both professional and personal," she announced her intentions to go solo. Producer Ethan Kath fired back with a statement containing all the sensitivity of a Donald Trump tweet. “i think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project,” he wrote. “it should be rewarding for her considering she didn’t appear on Crystal Castles’ best-known songs.” Then, for posterity, he listed more than a dozen of those songs. “people often gave her credit for my lyrics and that was fine, i didn’t care.” Clearly, he kind of did.
Just the mere act of continuing Crystal Castles seemed distasteful to many fans who’d assumed, as Glass had written, that her departure meant the end of the project. But Kath didn’t just replace Glass; he tried to scrub her from the band’s legacy. While it may be true that Glass was never the driving force behind Crystal Castles’ sound, on stage she was their star attraction, the group’s spiritual link to the punk community and the wild card that made their shows such a frightening spectacle (she always appeared on the cusp of coming to blows with anybody within reach). To many, she was the group, yet the band’s current press material doesn’t make so much as a single mention of her. Never mind that she’s pictured right there on the cover of their first album, or that her name adorns one of their signature songs; in Kath’s revisionist history of Crystal Castles, she made no meaningful contributions.
So Kath’s first Glass-less Crystal Castles album, Amnesty (I), arrives under uncomfortable circumstances. Its cover certainly doesn’t make it feel any less gross. (Is that photo of several nearly identical girls intended as commentary on how easily Kath believes women can be replaced?) Even the presumptuous (I) affixed to the title could be interpreted as a taunt, a sort of “there’s more to come” for anybody questioning the legitimacy of his new lineup.
But Kath’s never seemed too concerned about being cast as a villain; bad press has trailed the group since its earliest days. As he attempts to make the case that Crystal Castles was his project all along, the new music does a better job bolstering his claims than any written statement ever could. Amnesty never tops what came before, but its best moments come impressively close. Even though the band’s hostile electro-industrial fusion is less of a novelty than it was in 2008, nobody else is producing it quite like this, and Kath’s incinerating hellscapes are as jolting and tactfully concise as ever. He owns this sound.
Of course, once again, Kath owes his success in part to a strong collaborator. Inheriting the unenviable task of replacing one of the most singular frontwomen of the last decade, and under such tumultuous circumstances, new recruit Edith Frances proves more than capable. Though she lacks Glass’ violent temperament and scorched-earth conviction, she possesses a more controlled, refined voice that shines on Amnesty’s dreamier tracks, particularly “Char,” the most openly emotional pop song Crystal Castles has ever done. Her lavender soprano just barely brushes against the rotted-out trap beat of “Sadist,” and it’s so outmatched by the raved-up synths of closer “Their Kindness Is Charade” that the effect is heartbreaking.
Too often, though, Amnesty doesn’t give her the freedom to put much of her own stamp on the material. With its ghostly shrieks, “Frail” is so closely patterned after the old Crystal Castles playbook that many people assumed it was a leftover from the Glass era when Kath first shared it. The convulsing “Enth” feels similarly like the product of a time capsule. It’s as if Kath went out of his way to keep recording songs that sound just like the ones he did with Glass.
And so as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought. It could have played into the strengths of the band’s enigmatic new singer, embracing the more nuanced identity she could bring to the project. Instead, Frances and Kath evoke earlier iterations of Crystal Castles, where they could have moved forward. Fans can debate whether that’s disrespectful to Glass, but it doesn’t do the current band any favors, either. You can’t take full advantage of a new chapter if you’re too stubborn to even acknowledge that it is a new chapter at all.
