Crystal Castles “Tell Me What To Swallow”

April 22nd, 2008

crystal castles tell me what to swallow blog 2.jpgA couple of weeks ago I was having a snooze on an 8 hour flight to Amsterdam, and I had queued up a playlist of new-ish albums to listen to as I drifted in and out of sleep. Now, I’m an extremely solid sleeper (I switch up my alarm clock tone every few weeks just to make sure I don’t sleep through it), and the fact that fifteen tracks from Crystal Castles‘ self-titled album played without waking me up is a true testament to my extreme sleep skills.

What finally did wake me up, though, was an absolutely STUNNING song. An absolutely perfect lullaby closer to an album - think, Radiohead’s Videotape on In Rainbows or Elbow’s Flying Dream 143 on Cast Of Thousands. It’s called Tell Me What To Swallow and it sounds unlike anything else on the album. I had to double check the display because I thought a new album by a different artist had started. It’s a quiet and dark song that’s got some troubling lyrics that surely have a story behind them. Alice Glass’s vocals are all breath-y and full of echoes. So pretty!

The crime in all of this is the fact that Crystal Castles don’t have the song available in their MySpace player - they want you to think that their brand of brash ‘n rowdy “nintendocore” is all they’re capable of [UPDATE: A commenter pointed out that the song is on their MySpace page - it's just jumbled in with Courtship Dating, about 3 minutes in.] Hearing a gem like this kinda makes you feel like the rest of the album was a warmup or a ruse to what they’re actually capable of.

If you check out this album “teaser”, which has clips of each of the songs from the band’s debut album, you can hear a bit of it at the very end, from 7:34 to 7:56. It’s not much, but it might encourage you to pick it up the track on iTunes or other…

Posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 3:49 pm by Kat and is filed under Music & Videos.

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5 Responses to “Crystal Castles “Tell Me What To Swallow””

  1. Sounds a little disturbing just by the song title.

    By Senester on April 23, 2008 at 1:42 am |

  2. I love this song but

    a) those are the wrong lyrics

    b) the song is on their myspace player, it plays after Courtship Dating (on the same track)

    By yyyyyyy on April 23, 2008 at 6:28 am |

  3. Those aren’t the correct lyrics. The song is on the myspace player after Courtship Dating.

    By test on April 23, 2008 at 8:13 am |

  4. Wicked - you’re right! I’ll update my post. Thanks for the info.

    Also, the great thing about songmeanings.net is that it’s user contributed and the mods take lyric accuracy very seriously. So if you know the correct ones, submit a correction and it’ll be updated in no time!

    By kat on April 23, 2008 at 10:23 am |

  5. OMG - I LOVE THIS SONG!

    It started randomly playing on my ipod shuffle the other day, and since there is no display I had no idea who it was. Now that I’ve listened to it on their MySpace page, it all makes sense. My only complaint is that I wish the song was longer. I hope that Crystal Castles experiments more with this kind of music in the future.

    It’s a great track.

    By Soja on April 23, 2008 at 2:05 pm |

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