Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien (Memphis Industries)
2/5
By: Joe Daniels
Unable to inspire in any grandiose way, Lenses Alien is instead a record of comfortable passability, and represents a band content with re-appropriating the proven formula of their debut, Why There Are Mountains. The guitars are half-hearted, the vocals slurred, and the melodies buried. That said, it is an album with enough charm and swagger to entice multiple listens.
It’s as tired a cliché of journalism as it is musicianship to draw anything raw, rowdy, and cool back to Pavement, but the comparisons with Cymbals Eat Guitars are unignorable elephants in shrinking rooms. That’s not to disparage the band though – CEG are not an imitation of Malkmus and co’s lazy brand of slack, but a continuation. On ‘Keep Me Waiting’, for example, we have Joseph D’Agostino laconically slurring over the backdrop of a vicious anti-rhythm – it’s slacker-rock for sure, but with an overdriven potency that, like their much-celebrated debut, sets CEG apart from the modern landfill of lo-fi bands.
The apathetic shtick results in not so much an album of disappointment, but just approach. Seeing a capable, accomplished band make capable, accomplished songs is never going to be a bad thing, but the reluctance to develop is something of a shame – suggesting either insecurity, or at worst, complacency.
Album stand-outs include title-track ‘Lenses Alien’ and ‘Definite Darkness’, which both capture the debut’s essence and suggest an added urgency more akin to Dinosaur Jr than the Jicks, but they are let down elsewhere by despondency that comes across as sheer indifference to what they’re doing. It’s a balance that is seldom struck, between not caring and carelessness, and it’s the record’s main flaw.
A veritably okay album then. It’s 100% okay. But it really does leave you wishing it could, and should, be just a little bit more than that.
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name) by memphisindustries
Artists in this article: Cymbals Eat Guitars
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