Cymbals Eat Guitars
Why There Are Mountains
Self-Released
By Jose Fritz
Rusty beat me again. Dammit. He IM’d me in the middle of the day, waking me from my nocturnal sleep cycle and suggested I read the Stranded in Stereo blog. He’d just written up a post about Cymbals Eat Guitars. He sang me their praises.
(1:10:07 PM) Rustymofo: listen to it on headphones
(1:10:09 PM) Rustymofo: there's trumpets
(1:10:10 PM) Rustymofo: strings
(1:10:14 PM) Rustymofo: upright honky-tonk pianos
(1:10:16 PM) Rustymofo: glasses of water
(1:16:55 PM) JoseFritzEsquire: I'm quoting you
To paraphrase Lenny Kaye, there have always been two ways to look at the bloodstream of rock ‘n roll. The first is from the industry: there’s the labels, the artists, the managers, the producers and the dirty promoters that make it happen. The other is from the outside as the casual listener who becomes aware to greatness in response merely to hearing it. While the casual listener can be more relied upon to be honest, the industry is more likely to be critical, even viciously mean. The Joe on the street may feel some well-mannered instinct to be polite. In contrast we are manner-less, un-housebroken beasts with nothing to lose in the exchange of truly expressing our opinions. So I take Rusty’s endorsement of a band seriously.
Many bands combine genres in an A+B way. Rage Against the Machine is pretty clearly rap + metal. You can argue the particulars of Tom Morello’s Hendrixian playing or their prog-rock influences, but in a broad sense it’s pretty accurate. You could say that the Bad Plus = Be Bop + Rock and that statement again will have it’s detractors, but it’s true even if you want to muddle it with some pointless Klostermanesque reference to Roger Miller. With these bands it's very easy to see the separate parts. Cymbals Eat Guitars is wholly unlike that paradigm. They are like a big algorithmic goulash [A +B] x [C ÷ D] x E + √B – [E x D].
It has all these slight influences. They're not so seamless that you can’t hear them individually. It’s more like there are so many individually audible that they become a chorus, where you can see their faces but not hear their individual voices. It’s overwhelming to the auditory senses. I can’t focus enough to pick them all apart. This is a shame, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. So I am lost in it foolishly trying to dissect an animal bigger than me. Dissecting a frog is nothing. you pith the mofo and get the X-acto knife. Dissecting a whale is probably more accurate and also more akin to spelunking.
So, down in their guts I hear a brash-sounding Pavement, the Arcade Fire, Portugal the Man, and Bright Eyes. But then from the bottom of the bowel, deep in the resected incision I hear only Cymbals Eat Guitars.
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