Cave Rave

After almost three years since arriving on the scene with their debut album, 'Star Of Love', English / Spanish 'Folktronica' experimental group Crystal Fighters return with their eagerly anticipated 10-track sophomore release 'Cave Rave'.

If you'd spent the last few years of your life wrapped up in an album like 'Star Of Love', you'd go looking for a little respite too. Crystal Fighters' debut was the product of minds made manic by a deluge of fresh experience, both in the studio and on the road. It was inspired by an opera written by a man whose sanity disintegrated before he could finish it. It seemed to be influenced just as much by traditional Basque music from the 18th century as it was modern-day clubland, and contained residual traces of every genre, scene, style or party that had existed in-between.

But if album one was the sound of haywire electronic loops frantically kept spinning like plates on sticks, then album two is the story of Crystal Fighters' mastering control of those rave repetitions, withdrawing from the chaos of the club to carve their music into the shape of songs.

To write the album, Crystal Fighters retreated to the Basque hills, an area that they consider to be their spiritual home. Their music has always bore traces of the local sound of Basque Country - traditional instruments like txalapartas and txistus vying in the mix with razor edge guitars and percolating techno synths - but the purpose of this mission was different. Immersed in their creative cradle, they wanted to tap into something beyond their immediate experience, to uproot themselves from temporal bounds in order to write timeless songs.

The musical influences have widened too. While 'Star Of Love' was a manic, genre picking rush, 'Cave Rave' expands the sound palette even further. The beating hearts of Hispanic & African dance and Mexican electronic music now sit alongside folk and psychedelia, each artfully interpreted and united by the band's unconfined vision.

Distinctly Crystal Fighters, the sounds on the album are a mix between electronic, rock and traditional Basque.

The beating hearts of Hispanic & African dance and Mexican electronic music now sit alongside folk and psychedelia, each artfully interpreted and united by the band's unconfined vision.