Pitchfork Spotlight: Cymbals Eat Guitars

Sometimes I check out bands just because of the oddity of whatever name they've concocted for themselves. Without an expectation in sight, I found myself wanting to listen to the next track with that growing desire to hear everything the band has to offer. Cymbals Eat Guitars are a band from New York City, who mostly began playing together in high school, covering Weezer songs. Their debut album, Why There Are Mountains is mapped out like a legend of a travel hungry group of guys who want to see everything that isn't NYC. I cannot help feeling nostalgic for early Built to Spill and Modest Mouse records, as Cymbals Eat Guitars create this buildup in their album utilizing a variety of instrumentation layering on each other to create a tonal depth in each track. Their music creates a true destination of unknowingness and the mysteries that lie ahead, during this journey this gem of an album, unravels its true beauty.

CEG approaches grand ideas and tackling the darker aspects of one's self while exhibiting an awe struck love of our natural surroundings. I was stunned when I learned that Joseph Dagostino and Matt Miller were the tender age of 19 in the onset of this band. Based on the depth of the music exhibited in this initial trek, one cannot help but to be impressed by the wisdom and maturity of the two well beyond their years in their skill set and music making process.

"Wind Phoenix" is a true desert treasure recreating a wasteland of a lounge act's oeuvre and building the listener's expectation for an unknowing explosion of emotion. The paradox of this song is how the essence of the desolate towns of the old West are the setting for this amorous dote on what sounds to be a young man's in room entertainment experience with a female escort. The heat and buzz of the small town's motel sign overpowers the deafening silence and the incoherent brain waves that have the newly ingrained image of a single meeting with her.