Cymbals Eat Guitars exploded on the scene over a year ago. They received very favorable reviews from journalists, bloggers and the like. Since then, they have been touring and creating their follow up to Where There Are Mountains.Handout
The album title feels like it should be an anagram for something. There are a lot of puzzles on this second disc by the New York/New Jersey quartet. Their energetic music rests on a solid bed of post-grunge guitar rock, but most other indicators of things as per usual have been erased.
Events in the world – the Kennedy assassination, a freakish atmospheric meteor explosion, the shooting of a policeman – are freely stirred in with personal happenings. Names of actual places near the band's home turf come up frequently, but seem no more real than the virtual, game-world destination Horizon City (also mentioned). The membrane between self and world, fiction and reality, is porous here, as in dreams and hallucinations.
The music reflects that, in spite of its mostly conventional sounds, by warping and turning in new directions at points when less adventurous songwriters would be looking for the exit. The norm is a multipartite form, driven less by bar-counts and verse-chorus-verse than by some more mysterious compulsion to meet the next state of mind in an organic, non-formulaic way.
Rifle Eyesight seems overstuffed with melodic ideas, at a time when many bands (indie groups included) try to tease out an entire song from a meagre little tunelet. There's a shooter, and maybe a grassy knoll, and a lot of poetic description that does away with any sense of unified perspective beyond the driving rhythm of drums and bass. In the middle, even that kicks away, and the song drifts briefly into a zone of starry-night textural density, before recovering itself for a section that repeats some earlier material but couldn't really be called a recap.
"Two protons collide and everything everything changes," Joseph D'Agostino sings in Keep Me Waiting, tipping us to his general fascination with physics and the cosmos, but also finding a poetic image for the randomness of a violent act between two strangers. Unusually, the lyrics for these songs, printed in one dense stream on a single page, stand up to close examination, with or without the music.
"I feel the ghosts of all the parties still happening on this very spot," sings D'Agostino. After lines like that, the album's periodic shifts into a texture-based music feel like an externalization of a world view, and it isn't Newton's, either. Time really doesn't pass the same way in all places. Requirements of the language aside, the tenses of past and present run together, with only the future still, and always, missing.
Cymbals Eat Guitars likes to stay on the move, rhythmically and harmonically. This might be a great record for a road trip: The music is panoramic in its view, restless in its attitude even to perceptions that stick in the mind for later, further thought. There's nothing here you could call a ballad.
Another Tanguska tempers the explosive allusion to a 19th-century meteor with a closing section that sounds quite tender. More characteristically, the final song approaches its end with a great smeary guitar episode, a yelled-sung question – "is it teeth-shaking polyphony grace and completion or nothing [?] – a scream, and silence. Even that last absence of sound feels richer for everything that has come before.
Lenses Alien
- Cymbals Eat Guitars
- Barsuk Records
Other new releases:
COUNTRY
Own the Night
- Lady Antebellum
- Capitol
- * *
After winning both the Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys last February, Lady Antebellum officially became the hottest act in country music — which is a bit strange, given that the trio doesn't really sound country at all. True, Own the Night is full of songs that celebrate the suburban reality of American life and revel in the nostalgic ache of lost love, but between the Fleetwood Mac-style harmonies and Bon Jovi-like power ballads, Lady Antebellum sounds more like reconstituted classic rock than anything from Music Row. And while the album probably sounds great in a pickup truck, it'd sound even better in an elevator. J.D. Considine
JAZZ
The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings
- Frank Sinatra/Count Basie
- Concord Jazz/Frank Sinatra
- * * * *
Even though he got his start as a big-band singer, with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra didn't do a lot of jazz singing, instead applying the swing in his phrasing to more dramatic, storytelling ends. But for the two studio albums he made with Count Basie in the early sixties, Sinatra went all-out. Half of the tracks here were recorded with Quincy Jones handling the arrangements and production, and typify Sinatra's ring-a-ding cool. But the other 10, cut with Basie stalwart Neal Hefti, swing harder and find the singer improvising new melodies on the lyrics, making it one of the most daring albums of his career. J.D.C.
FOLK/COUNTRY
White Hat
- Big Harp
- Saddle Creek
- ***
"It's hard these days to keep a white hat clean when everybody wants to throw mud/everybody wants to pull the statue down, and everybody wants to see blood." Not much has changed since the days when Springsteen found it hard to be a saint in the city. It's ugly out there, bubba, and Chris Senseney knows it all too well. On a nicely written album of saloony shuffles and jauntier country blues, L.A.-based Senseney (with his wife's help) sketches characters who share resignation, his Tiparillo-flavoured voice carrying weariness like a horse too long on the trail. Moods are grey. There's a common element of escape – the protagonist of Goodbye Crazy City is whipped but good – and the singing is charmingly slack. Comparisons can be made to Townes Van Zandt; I hear Toronto's Bahamas, as if on an El Paso holiday. Saddle up – the hope is that Big Harp is just getting started. Brad Wheeler
ROCK
Believers
- A.A. Bondy
- Fat Possum
- ***
On his third, maybe best, record, A.A. Bondy leads you into the shadows. When you ask him if it's safe and if he knows where he's going, he doesn't say a word – just keeps on walking. Unlike the sparser American Hearts and When the Devil's Loose albums, Believers is full with surrounding sound – psychedelic-folk ambience and languor, all tangled up in spooky blue. There is a moody majesty to Down in the Fire (Lost Sea), which swims in thick liquid, Pink Floyd-like. Surfer King rides a little lighter, with a hazy chorus that suggests Wilco in the poppy fields. It's music to nod off to, in the best possible way. B.W.
A. A. Bondy plays Vancouver's Media Club, Oct. 7.