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A 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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