Breaking Artist: Crystal Castles

Who: Toronto duo Crystal Castles, who, after a string of EPs and acclaimed remixes are ready to flood your eardrums with their own self-titled full-length debut on March 18th.

Sounds Like: An amalgamation of Klaxons' nu-rave dance, the Velvet Underground's more cacophonous moments and the 8-bit aesthetics of famed Nintendo composers Yoshihiro Sakaguchi and Koji Kondo. The band was shocked when they discovered how quickly their music (literally) moved people. "One of our first shows, the venue said 'We've been hosting shows for years, but no one really dances at our shows,' " multi-instrumentalist Ethan Fawn says, "but people like dancing to Crystal Castles."

Vital Stats:

• Legrand's uncle is the great French film composer Michel Legrand, who scored films by Jean-Luc Godard (A Woman is a Woman, Band of Outsiders) and was nominated for Academy Awards for scoring The Thomas Crown Affair and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

• Avoiding the White Stripes route of band relations, the duo is admittedly not romantically-involved. Legrand has a boyfriend, while Scally dates a chef on the Food Network's Ace of Cakes.

• The band is a product of Baltimore's exploding indie-rock movement. After the center of renaissance is the Wham City artist collective, which boasts CMJ favorite Dan Deacon as its poster child.

Hear It Now: Devotion hits shelves in CD stores and digital music services on February 28th. In the meantime, check out their video for "Master of None," off their self-titled debut album.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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