Crystal Antlers: People Go ‘Crystal Who?’

A workplace hazard of the music writer is to over-emphasise biographical quirks. In Crystal Antlers’ case, the quirk is this: they once all worked as chimney sweeps. When I ask frontman and bassist Jonny Bell about it, he’s still willing to entertain the story: “The company I worked for was called ‘Chim Chimney,’ so we went for that whole Mary Poppins aesthetic. We wore top hats and everything.” But, he adds wearily: “It always gets brought up but it doesn’t have much to do with our music.” Still, it’s my job to ask.

The reality of the Long Beach, California sextet’s formation was rather less romantic. “We actually met in a high school musical class. Our teacher got arrested on suspicion of child molesting, and the school didn’t have any money to hire a substitute, so we just kinda messed around. That’s when we started playing together, and then a couple of years after that we started the band.”

When I get through to Bell, Crystal Antlers are ensconced in their van en route to Manchester, on the latest leg of a journey that’s taken them from local punk nobodies to the vanguard of American rock. It’s been just a year since they unleashed their literally-titled EP, a six-track statement of intent that was produced by Mars Volta keys-man Ikey Owens, garnished with glittering reviews, and subsequently re-released in October. Looking back, Bell sees it as a stepping stone: “It helped us to get focused and Ikey taught us a lot about how everything works in the music industry. We’re still sort of transitioning from kids playing music in a garage to being a real touring band.”

And despite an endless tour that has included a pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas, a riverboat in Lyon, France, and “a million parties anywhere you can think of”, Crystal Antlers still found time to record their debut LP. Their profile may be heading skyward, but on Tentacles they were keen to maintain the garage rock feel of the EP. “Generally what we’re trying to accomplish is a live sound,” Bell says. “I don’t think that our music is suited well to being polished, I don’t know if it really can be. So when we’re in the studio we play everything live. We usually try to get it in the first three or four takes, so it’s as raw as possible.”

‘Raw’ is probably the simplest way of describing the Crystal Antlers sound, although critics have lumbered them with a multitude of dusty genres. To set the record straight, I run each past Bell. While he’s happy to accept the comparisons to psychedelic rock (“We use organs that are mainly used in 60s music so I think that that gives it that sound”), soul (“The one type of music that we all really enjoy”) and punk (“It’s part of it but we try to expand on that”), he is scathing about the references to prog rock. “I don’t really get that,” Bell complains. “When I think of prog rock there’s no song to it, no soul. It’s very much like white men showing off and I feel that we have songs. There’s never jamming in our songs – things are written and there’s no improvisation element to it.”

Controlled aggression; methodical mayhem; call it what you like, but it’s a style that makes for a kinetic live show. I ask Bell if it gets physically gruelling. “When it comes to playing live we all get so into what we’re doing we somehow find the energy,” he says. “It’s hard for me not to be energetic when we’re playing. We had some shows on this tour when I got sick and lost my voice, and there were people telling me not to sing and to take it easy but I couldn’t do that. I got up there and sang every song.” Unlike the drug-fuelled, stage-trashing rockers of the 60s with which they are constantly compared, Crystal Antlers take their job seriously. “I try to avoid the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle as much as possible,” Bell says. “Like on this tour we got to stop at Lake Geneva, spend a day there skipping rocks on the lake. The things we like to do outside of playing music are pretty contrary to how our live show is.”

Which only leaves one last question: why the sudden proliferation of ‘Crystal’-named bands? “My theory is that people in the music industry get so hyped and nobody knows what’s happening half the time," Bell explains. "People go ‘Crystal who?’ They’ll be looking for our record and they’ll buy a Crystal Stilts record and then they’ll try to go to a Crystal Stilts show and they’ll end up at a Crystal Antlers show and they think that they’re seeing Crystal Castles.”

So it might actually have helped their cause? “Yeah, I think it’s helped all three bands.” With Crystal Antlers, fact is evidently stranger than fiction.