Crystal Castles’ “(III)” is an interesting answer to the Canadian duo’s innovative seat in electronic music today. With a thematic hatred for cultural divides, Crystal Castles presents a package of club-ready beats that pulse with new intensity. But does it capture the blunt power of the band’s previous releases?

An answer can be found in “(III)”’s production. Producer and songwriter Ethan Kath’s compositional style first suggests urgency taken to a new level; the duo purportedly only used first takes of each song. This is rarely apparent in the finished product. The songs’ vocals are submerged under countless layers of pulsing synths and clouded with reverb and masking effects. Alice Glass is helpless and drowning in “Sad Eyes,” where the couple makes their closest offering to an EDM-hungry audience. Below the pulverizing noise she sounds limp when she should scream incendiary.

The direct kicking and screaming of “Crystal Castles (II)” and their debut album can be felt after mere minutes of listening, but “(III)” questions the band’s intentions and surely changes their approach to the electronic music that they have sculpted in recent years. In almost every area in which they aggressively propelled their aesthetic towards the listener before, Crystal Castles now have become subjects of their own corruption, creating an electronic album in 2012 that imitates itself and begs to be categorized. Kath and Glass have moved away from primal ingenuity towards the blue and grey monotony of their heavily processed Samuel Arranda cover art; all that remains is a hollow shell of something that was once disturbing, visceral, impactful and great.

2/5