The fate of the world is safe in the Crystal Castle.  Experimental electronica duo Alice Glass and Ethan Kath may have nicked their name from a She-Ra advert for little girls, but step into the electroland of their first two albums and an 8-bit pneumatic drill of narcotic white noise chip-tunes your skull into pieces.

Beside the beeps and blips of the likes of ‘Good Time’ and ‘Baptism’, though, were Alice’s intoxicating vocals in ‘Tell Me What to Swallow’ and ‘Celestica’.  Lovers of this indie goddess’s voice will swoon into the reverie of Crystal Castles’ third album, a wave of seductive, soothing and melancholic vocals blurred seamlessly with synths.

Recording straight to tape in Warsaw, Glass and Kath have chucked out their digital keyboards and FX pedals in favour of retro analogue synths.  Expecting something similar to the raw sound of Alice Practice, their first unintentionally recorded 7” vinyl in 2006, the smoothness of this album came as a surprise.

It’s a smoothness appropriate for a bleak album, but also in danger of becoming trance material for Cindies.  ‘Sad Eyes’ vomits up repetitive pop hooks to the hiss of dry ice.  The stuff of prime time TV, it’s glitzy enough to accompany a man out of the lift on ‘Take Me Out’ and, come to think of it, sounds a bit like the Casualty theme tune.

In ‘Kerosene’, though, Alice’s lyrics and vocal distortions dart along a bass line which fades into an unobtrusive oily undertow.  Likewise, the bass and synths of ‘Mercenary’ are coaxed into being by Alice’s whispers, pushing conventional electronica down an escalator to dance to the squeal of tube brakes and the echo of buskers.

There is still plenty of classic Crystal Castles in the brittle 8-bit whine of ‘Pale Flesh’ and for fans of ‘Doe Deer’, a 1:46 dose of Insulin.  That’s 1:46 of relentless drumming, wailing vocals and all-round lo-fi chaos. 

Crystal Castles’ softened tone is evident from the album art to their final song ‘Child I Will Hurt You’. Their new sound might be a move towards the mainstream, but they are nowhere near being thrown onto the witch-house wagon or whacked on the Cindies playlist. For now, in the words of She-Ra, the Crystal Castle remains the source of all power.