Album Review: Crystal Fighters “Everything Is My Family” Makes You Want To Hug Life
Crystal Fighters’ Everything Is My Family is a quick-paced, abstract dream into the mind of a batch of hippies. Many cross between the complimentary and insulting nature of this term. While some acknowledge free love and peace is a good way to see life, others find hippies a “lazy” crew. Well, Crystal Fighters have created a record that shows this group is an exhilarating one to join.
Everything Is My Family is dedicated to discovering one’s interconnections with life. It uses simple lyrics in repetition to ingrain the singular virtues that enliven life: love, peace, and wisdom. Songs like “Lay Low”, repeat poetic lyrics like, “Our Love Will Shine In Gold”, with such a gleeful hook that you can see love falling from the sky in golden pieces. It is a beautiful sentiment that courses through the record to produce a positivism that challenges listeners. Personally, I feel positivity can be more challenging to acquire and maintain than negativity. We all have the tendency to look and absorb what goes wrong with our life more so than what goes right, and not many take the opportunity to unlearn this habit, but Crystal Fighters have in Everything Is My Family. This explains why the album is about feeling one with the universe/environment.
Only when you focus on the good of life, will you learn how to be apart of it. Tracks like “Yellow Sun” and “Living The Dream” are pulsed by incessant, tribal drumming representative of the spiritual rush one feels when they see the light of life rather then its darkness. These songs make you want to dance freely around a bonfire under the moonlight, particularly because lead singer Sebastian has a hypnotic voice that blends well with the mystic undertones of this band. Each song is like swinging crystals placing in you in a meditative state so that make you tranquilly walk through life rather than exasperatedly trudging through it. Hence, Everything Is My Family plays like a recorded jam session. Sebastian, Gilbert, Graham, Ellie and Nila sing harmonies like a choir praising life for its joy, which makes you want to listen to the album again and again.