The end is the beginning
With a different name
Laughter in sheets of metal
Cutting through a memory of stone
Crush of Souls has always carried himself like a man who missed the last train, stole a delivery van, and decided the road ahead probably merged into a bassline. On Captive Youth, his third full-length album, mastermind Charles Rowell turns that perpetual displacement into nine tracks of industrial dance music built for warehouses, bruised romances, and people who have memorized every fire exit in Europe.
Rowell has spent years moving through Crocodiles, Flowers of Evil, Issue, and assorted corners of the international punk underground. Captive Youth treats that history as fuel for a hard reset. The guitars and dark folk traces that once framed the project have been pushed aside in favor of body music, synth-pop, and machine-driven club pressure. New Order’s Technique, Nitzer Ebb’s Belief, Psychic TV’s Towards Thee Infinite Beat, and Anne Clark’s Pressure Points hover nearby as useful coordinates, although Rowell keeps the material personal enough to avoid sounding like a man trapped beneath a collapsing record collection.
Crush Of Souls’ rhythms move with the blunt authority of warehouse machinery, while the drums crack with enough force to make your landlord inspect the ceiling. These rhythms give Rowell room to write about politics, sex, labor, family, and youth as a vanishing resource. His voice carries the exhaustion of somebody who has crossed too many borders and still has enough nerve to flirt at customs. Romance remains present, though it usually appears with a split lip and questionable identification. Across the record, desire keeps colliding with bureaucracy, mortality, and the sort of private ruin no nightclub stamp can excuse.
Dying To Stay Young cuts deep. Its family has been starved of affection, surrounded by violence, and taught to regard survival as another form of punishment. Blades, prisons, fire, graves, and fallen angels crowd the lyric, while youth becomes a condition everyone is desperate to preserve even as the body and the world conspire against it. The repeated appeal for the sun to open wide gives the song a strange grandeur, as though daylight itself might expose the damage or burn away whatever remains.
Joshua Hourigan’s video extends that unease through snowbound landscapes, fractured edits, spectral figures, and an old castle that looks overdue for either an exorcism or Enya and her army of cats. A spirit dancer appears behind windows, veiled and confined, their movements suggesting souls held inside a structure that has forgotten why it keeps them. Glitches interrupt the scenery, turning the surrounding wilderness into a damaged transmission from somewhere colder and less forgiving.
Watch the video for Dying to Stay Young below:
Captive Youth is lean, physical, and politically alert, carrying Rowell’s wandering-worker sensibility into a tougher electronic frame. The album understands that staying young can become another exhausting job, complete with bad hours, no benefits, and a manager named Death, who never approves leave.
Captive Youth is out now via Avant! Records. Order and stream the album here.
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The post Cutting Through a Memory of Stone — Crush Of Souls Explores the Ruins of an Old Castle in Video “Dying to Stay Young” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
