Cymbals Eat Guitars - Mutant indie-rock

Being born, growing up and living in New York, or its surroundings, must really be quite a feeling - finding yourself right at the center of the world, in the place where things happen. And if you've got some good ideas, some decent cards to play, you can find fertile humus for your project to sprout in. Joseph D'Agostino and his schoolmate Matthew Miller are from Staten Island, one of the Big Apple's five boroughs, and grow up obsessed with 90s alternative music, stuff like Pavement, slightly oblique material. They play guitar and drums respectively, and on top of that Joseph crosses the various influences he's absorbed to come up with his own ideas, which he soon shares and brings to life thanks to the contribution of Matt Cohen (guitar), Neil Berenholz (bass) and Daniel Baer (keyboards), all recruited through ads posted more or less everywhere.

In 2007 this becomes the original core of Cymbals Eat Guitars, a name borrowed from an old line by Lou Reed, used to explain the sound of his Velvet Underground. A line-up destined to change over time, with D'Agostino as its only fixed presence. This will be the lineup that gives birth to the first recordings.

Two years go by and the band debuts with the self-produced Why There Are Mountains, a work that tends to cross the elusive shoegaze of "Loveless" with the emotional mini-suites of "Perfect From Now On" and the emphatic charges of "Funeral". All of this is evident in the crystalline "Share" (an early version of which had been released on a compilation dated 2008, marking a kind of baptism for the band), the result of a formula that mixes ambient cacophonies and brass-driven hymns wrapped in cloaks of guitars. "And The Hazy Sea" is an even more schizophrenic piece, swaying between supersonic outbursts and slowcore surges. Many will compare this work to Built To Spill (though Cymbals trade Doug Martsch's original lament for collective hysteria) and to Modest Mouse ("Cold Spring" is a clear exercise in imitation of them), but the band is already looking for a path of its own.

"What Dog See", with no drum part at all, is a dreamy chant wrapped in dissonant touches, coagulated into soft soundscapes; the almost expressionist "Like Blood Does" is an art-rock poem that, starting from a voice-and-guitar recitative, builds its own idea of a crescendo, with the guitar doubling itself in free glissandi before taking flight, welcoming in tribal drums and mangled strings. The melodic role is taken on by "Wind Phoenix", enriched by xylophone, variations, little marches and timid semi-jams, while "The Loving North", "Some Trees" and "Indiana" are pop and noir-wave sketches, built on fractured time signatures and a personal take on the shoegaze imagery.

Why There Are Mountains is a dazzling debut, boasting a noble use of noise, layers and torrents of sound, at times dense and material, at times airy, depending on the moment. Not always consistent, the record can at times feel weighed down by sly deja-vus, where the musicians occasionally seem to prefer theoretical allure, as if it were a map drawn up at a desk. Everything moves by consuming, but above all by beguiling, the listener's time. Its movements are wooden in the melodies and flowing in the cacophonies - a paradox fitting enough to justify its very existence. Small sins of inexperience that don't undermine the final result, which remains a thoroughly respectable debut.

The good reviews earned on American soil meanwhile help Cymbals put together a solid run of promotional shows, including some dates opening for The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and even for Flaming Lips.

But the first lineup changes soon follow: Berenholz and Baer leave the fold, replaced respectively by Matthew Whipple on bass and Brian Hamilton on keyboards. Even loyal Miller hands the drums over to Andrew Dole, leaving D'Agostino (the band's mastermind, after all) as the sole surviving original member.

Toward the end of summer 2011 the new lineup releases the second chapter, Lenses Alien, which will catapult Cymbals Eat Guitars into the spotlight of the global indie-rock stage. It's a work charged with tension and neurosis, making unpredictability its absolute creed. It turns Pavement-ian looseness into lyric poetry, justifies the unfinished endings of quite a few songs (at times they almost seem born of indecision) with an emotional urgency that's at times feverish. It revives the 90s revival in a strange light of modern allegory. It trades melodies for the musicians' derailing sarabands and the frontman's verbose j'accuse, crowned the new bard of the contemporary age. For many, Lenses Alien is the new language of classicism, and it hardly matters if listenability pays the price, coming out of it rather battered - a shortfall that won't help the band reach an audience wider than the niche it already occupies. But the die is cast, and the record is met everywhere with great enthusiasm from critics.

The eight minutes of "Rifle Eyesight" are a mission statement for the new Cymbals, a manifesto of intent, a veritable epigram of irrationality: from the start, the contrast between a post-rock-shaped quiet and an emo-core-shaped loud dominates the listen, which soon settles into grainy soundscapes recalling both interstellar Pink Floyd and vintage noise. On the opposite end, "Gary Condit" is ambiguously torn between concerted stretches and that distorted power-pop typical of grunge, complete with fuzz pedals and a final sonic delirium.

The central tracks, far less ambitious, swing between cubist power-pop ("Shore Points") and linear bursts that distorted background storms try to overthrow ("Keep Me Waiting"). Small emotional poems come in the form of "Painclothes", a narration sustained by shoegaze chords, the martyrdom of "Secret Family", and the chain of quiet dissonances of "The Current", which burns out in just two minutes. For all its apparent chaos, Lenses Alien is one of the most lucid musical portraits of our era, as scattershot as it is the product of a precise, premeditated plan. An album that cannot be ignored when it comes to correctly judging and analyzing the health of the 2010s indie scene, rightly recognized as the most accomplished and daring project by the Staten Island combo.

Exactly three years go by, and wonderful confirmation arrives with the third studio chapter, LOSE, a record built around the theme of loss. Cymbals Eat Guitars keep hitting the mark, indelibly capturing on record what a band can produce today once it has found the right trade-off between indie attitude and the pursuit of complexity. Perhaps the result is less striking than "Lenses Alien", but where that album surprised through the novelty effect of a lineup still unknown to most, here the amazement comes from their ability to confirm themselves at a striking level, favoring less intricate but no less evocative solutions.

LOSE holds within it a long series of good reasons to take notice, definitively cutting the band loose from a certain musical imagery typical of the two decades just gone by, and thrusting it forcefully into the present - something evident right from the epic breath of "Jackson", the track that best links back to the previous record, and precisely for that reason is placed at the start of the tracklist. Lyrically, LOSE comes across as deeply autobiographical, with D'Agostino centering his songwriting on memories tied to the (loss of) youth, at times raw or melancholy. The band proves to be a credible experimenter, able to stretch out atmospheres without ever becoming tedious, while at the same time having discovered the recipe for building the perfect "alternative" pop song. Throughout, the experimental-noise streak is backed by the presence in the producer's chair of John Agnello, a man who in the past has known how to blend the sounds of the likes of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. - hardly small names.

The record can ideally be split into sections: the second and third tracks, “Warning” and “XR” respectively, represent its angriest side, with the former a bursting alt-rock number not too far from the post-hardcore of bands like Trail Of Dead, complete with a false ending, and the latter a blazing folk-rock piece kicked off by searing harmonica. “XR” sketches out one of the album's most touching moments, in which Joseph remembers his late friend Benjamin High, who was very close to him during the early days of his artistic journey. The more structured “Place Names” (rounded off with a sonic closing section built on dissonant guitars) is the bridge leading into the two key moments of the album, which define its boldest-textured midsection. On the crystalline “Child Bride,” a little electro-acoustic gem that fittingly sits right in the middle of the tracklist, D'Agostino sings about abuse, keeping the overall level of drama high. Equally essential is the long “Laramie,” the record's most experimental moment, opening with a Prince-style falsetto before unfolding into a twist-filled structure.

The seventh and eighth tracks, the breezy “Chambers” and the miraculous “LifeNet,” represent instead the most cathartically indie-pop corner of LOSE, offering a few minutes of seemingly light relief that lend the record a flexibility — and above all a listenability — the Cymbals had never had before. On the closing “2 Hip Soul,” calm and desperate at once, everything fades out on the notes of a gentle piano, the very same one that opened “Jackson,” magically closing the circle. And so the curtain falls on one of those works that will probably, in time, be recognized as a worthy representative of the indie culture of our era. An essential record for 2014.

September 2016 brings Pretty Years, with which Cymbals officially earn their license as a shape-shifting band. And not just thanks to the artistic evolution charted so far: the Staten Island outfit's fourth record sublimates even more strongly their knack for blending genres and references. The album's overall tone is lighter and catchier than ever before, partly because its surprisingly fresh and energetic (alt-)pop mood — meant as an open tribute to everyone's younger years — is set from the opening one-two of “Finally” / “Have A Heart,” and reaffirmed later by tracks like “Well.” And with a crazy song like “Wish,” capable of stringing together, within a matter of seconds, irresistible horns, an over-the-top and irresistible parody of the Boss, synth textures borrowed from the '80s, and a perfectly stadium-sized chorus, well, that's a surefire winner.

But it's not over yet: on “Close” the band crosses the Strokes with the least introspective side of the Cure (easier said than done!), on “4th Of July, Philadelphia” they stage what sounds like a lost mid-period Wilco track, just with a touch more fuzz, and on the intense, textbook ballad “Mall Walking” they quote “Come As You Are” in the finale (ah yes, back when we were all a little younger...). More entertaining than in the past, Cymbals move with real command of means and language, from melancholy ballads like “Dancing Days” and “Shrine” to a hardcore-punk gut-punch the size of “Beam,” almost entirely banishing overly cerebral complexity and experimentation.

Track after track, Joseph D'Agostino proves remarkably skilled at making his own creation sound like someone else, yet in the end Cymbals Eat Guitars increasingly sound like, above all, themselves. Being able to craft a copy of ideas already explored by others, and pull it off with such strong personality, remains a small miracle, a thoroughly enjoyable feat.

Contributions by Michele Saran (“Why There Are Mountains,” “Lenses Alien”)

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