Way back in 2008, I found myself getting all hot and sweaty over a band called Crystal Stilts, on the strength of a six-song EP that was only available by download from the inexplicably successful (or so I assume) business model that calls itself eMusic. What I liked about these songs was that they embraced the idea of "lo-fi", not as a defined genre or commercial strategy, but in the sense of "we recorded these songs as quickly as we could and on whatever shitty equipment we could find because we knew no other way and we hope you like them anyway". Which, if this was 20 years ago, I would have happily stood in some sweaty Brunswick Street hotel watching them night after night, and fanzining them to death. Also, there was something almost tangible connecting them to the two competing strands of the kind of Flying Nun records I liked from those times, at one end populated by the Jefferies brothers, and at the other by the melodic likes of The Clean, The Bats and The Chills.
But it is now 2009, and Crystal Stilts have released an Actual Record, on an Actual Label, made with Actual Money, and most of the magic has been lost in the process. In trying to stay the same, they seem to have lost what made them special (like, or so I'm told, what happened to Hong Kong after the handover). What was affecting now sounds like affectation. They often make me think of The Clean with a hangover, which is not something I would necessarily want to listen to.
There is one song, the final one on the record ("The City In The Sea"), which suggests one possibly fruitful direction for them to go in. It drifts along on languid guitars that do what they did on the third Velvet Underground album, which is to say, it sounds more Galaxie 500 than Flying Nun. But even if they do decide to catch that train, I suspect that I won't be riding it with them, if only because I can go back to those Galaxie 500 and Flying Nun records any time I want, and that's good enough for me.
