After releasing an album so indebted to the hard rockers of 90's indie music, it seems prudent for a band to take stock of its own creative viability and determine what steps they need to take in order to avoid being pigeonholed as only backward looking rockers. At some point the bands own musical identity needs to rise above their influences and exert the proper amount of pull to allow them to come at the music in a slightly different way, a more subtly influential way. You can only mine the sound of bands like Built To Spill or Modest Mouse for so long before you go from repectful homage to deliberate rip-off. But fortunately, for a band still in the youth of its tenure, Cymbals Eat Guitars have the ability to turn these influences, which permeated so much of their debut album, inward and have created an album as indebted to those influences as to their own singular musical vision.
On Lenses Alien, the overriding sense is of a band which has become so enamored and familiar with their own influences that they've integrated the best parts of them and come away with a sound as much their own influential assimilation as respectful acknowledgment of their forebears. That's not to say that Cymbals Eat Guitars have lost their own sense of creative direction, far from it. But it's through this direct link to the bands which they admire that they've found a place where they can manipulate the sounds of these archetypal works and develop their own take on modern indie rock. Deceptive from the get-go with lengthy opener "Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)", a song concerned with the narration of an unsettling protaganist who may or may not be someone you should be afraid of, the track showcases the feedback soaked guitar washes we expect from them but is immediately darker and displays a depth of musical maturity which has been built upon since their debut. Other tracks like the shimmering, chunky guitar rock of "Definite Darkness" play freely with the constructs of indie rock while slightly augmenting them with their own creative arrangements to develop something familiar, while at the same time feeling completely original. Cymbals Eat Guitars may not need you to guess who they like to listen to; it's obvious really, but it's that communal respect and admiration, that knowingness between them and us that draws you in to see the underlying differences and burts of ecstatic musical joy as more than just a band playing to the strenghths of their influences, though they are. This is music which stands on its own, held up by the respect they have for their peers and influences and for us as listeners. By never pandering to our expectations of what their sophomore album should be, they have given us a new view into their own surging, in-love-with-sound headspace and to be honest, it feels pretty comfortable there.
Tracklisting:
01. Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)
02. Shore Points
03. Keep Me Waiting
04. Plainclothes
05. Definite Darkness (listen to the mp3 below)
06. Another Tunguska
07. The Current
08. Wavelengths
09. Secret Family
10. Gary Condit
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