Pitchfork Forkcast: Video: Crystal Castles: "Air War"

Video: Crystal Castles: "Air War"

It's been almost a year since Toronto duo Crystal Castles earned Forkcast's "Rising" designation on the strength of a few formidable remixes and original tracks like the abstracted, stuttering video-game electronics of "Air War". The video for the track from their forthcoming self-titled debut calls to mind the aesthetically similar New York electro-punk duo Hearts Revolution, if only because the latter built up part of their rep selling ice cream. In the clip, Crystal Castles' Alice and Ethin walk around with ice cream cones on their head. After a brief bus ride, they meet a black-clad dude yammering into his cell phone, and they cheer him up by spontaneously producing some ice cream of their own, as 8-bit synths bleep and bloop around Alice's fractured vocals. There's more frozen goodness in store for a guy in a red-and-black flannel shirt, and then vinyl-shopping, hopscotch, and finally a monolithic black portal into an alternate universe-- of ice cream. You've still got me, Crystal Castles.