| 90 |
Delusions of Adequacy
With Crystal Castles’ infectious, eclectic music, this is easily one of the highlights of the year and a great addition to the super-genre that is electronic music.
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| 80 |
New Musical Express
It is also, perhaps more importantly, an album absolutely overloaded with spine-tingling, pulse-quickening electro noises.
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| 80 |
Prefix Magazine
Crystal Castles leaves its mark as an electro record that challenges, succeeding and failing all at once, and perhaps most important, never forgetting the primary goal of dance music.
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| 80 |
Hot Press
Hotly tipped Canadian electro duo Crystal Castles deliver the goods on their debut album.
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| 80 |
Drowned In Sound
Glass’s voice, too, is the same that’s been luring lusty seamen onto the rocks for millennia, but the way it and the drums are textured--so that the machines they’re passed through sound like they’re melting away--brings Crystal Castles to the outer edges of greatness.
|
| 80 |
All Music Guide
It's clear that Kath and Glass are already looking for more ways to expand on this familiar-sounding, edgy, innocent, menacing, bold, nuanced, and altogether striking debut.
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| 78 |
Pitchfork
They don't stay in one place for too long, but the body of the album can be distilled to an essence of the glassy, ten-lane stare of Last Exit with Ed Banger's egg-frying EQ.
|
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
Such blipping and beeping stay true to the pair's beginnings as an eight-bit band, but Crystal really pushes all the right buttons when factoring wistful melodies into its playful computer glitches. [21 Mar 2008, p.57]
|
| 70 |
Spin
Kath's hooky charms ease the ferocity of singer Alice Glass' panting wails and loopy, sarcastic screams. [Apr 2008, p.94]
|
| 70 |
Urb
Producer Ethan Fawn's dynamic overlays of crisp, factory-stomped melodic lines carry Glass's unintelligible lyrics straight to neon-lit nausea heaven.
|
| 70 |
Tiny Mix Tapes
Every song is serrated with pixel edges, and Alice Glass’ sometimes morose, sometimes lilting like a Valley girl vocals vibrate with such catchy and violent gloom that it’d send any human/marmoset/sentient being into an epileptic dance session.
|
| 70 |
Under The Radar
Lyrics? Hardly intelligible. But when the beats are this good, words barely matter anyway. [Spring 2008, p.88]
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| 70 |
Dot Music
All told, it's pleasant to actually have a buzz album that lives up to expectations; long after people stop talking about them, this album will still be a surprising and compelling listen.
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| 60 |
Observer Music Monthly
From the full-on Nintendo Wii panic-attack of 'Alice Practice' to the breezy, off-kilter electro-pop of 'Crimewave' and 'Air War', this sumptuously squelchy 16-track debut already feels like a Greatest Hits.
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| 60 |
Uncut
What could be a kitschy nostalgia trip, however, becomes something more thanks to the songs themselves. [Apr 2008, p.94]
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| 60 |
Slant Magazine
Crystal Castles' most rockist moments seem to wish to appear arty by being as annoying as possible. It's a tricky maneuver, and the fact that the group doesn't quite pull it off screws up the coherence of this otherwise strong record, but that doesn’t make them any less promising.
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| 60 |
Alternative Press
Crystal Castles is gloriously danceable and hopelessly chic. But really, it's... hearing only...judging is... you know? [Apr 2008, p.162]
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| 57 |
cokemachineglow
They finally hit a hipster-heavy scene with what should have been a maverick heat-seeker of a debut and end up too tiring to interest most of the hipsters who long ago became bored of swapping their “Alice Practice” 7” on Soulseek.
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