After realising a fantastic first album in 2009’s self-released Why There Are Mountains, Cymbals Eat Guitars reappear to attempt another bout of indie sub-genre mashery with Lenses Alien. Channelling a much more expansive sound, this second record is a swirling progression into a whole host of musical and lyrical realms. The songs in general have become more complex and calculated, using feedback and looped distortion consistently to provide a ghostly atmosphere that permeates the listener on a subconscious level. With this move into multifaceted song construction, the band sound tighter and more tuned-in, which thankfully still works with the floating, carefree melodies of frontman Joseph D’Agostino. This is the product of a group who knew they had to push themselves away from nonchalant repetition of first album successes.
At over eight minutes long, album opener ‘Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)’ plays out like a synopsis of the entire record, and in parts sounds operatic in scope. The accenting piano lends a flowing, jazzy undertone and the song tears itself in half at one point in a breakdown and build-up that sounds like the end of a classical movement. Emerging from this comes a discordant, lush riff of three or four slightly distorted guitars, moving into an energetic four-four verse. With this opening manifesto, the band introduce post-hardcore influences that make their sound a whole lot heavier, and the final chorus is a gloriously noisy affair that ends anti-climactically and seems deliberately unsatisfying. Happily the opening of ‘Shore Points’ is the exact opposite; the initial riff and accompanying vocal melody are the high point of the whole album, despite the strange similarity to ‘Nothing to Lose’ by whine connoisseurs Billy Talent. The guitars have a fluid motion that make you feel as if you’re moving even if you’re sat dead still, and the vocal harmony is breathtaking enough to give you shivers. However, like ‘The Current’ later on, the song feels as if it has potential to be a looming skyscraper of a piece, but is instead culled in infancy at two and a half minutes. Despite a reverb-soaked guitar solo that winks at Beach House, the song almost feels like a MySpace teaser track, again lacking a sense of completeness. Further on, ‘Another Tunguska’ is the sister of ‘Tunguska’ from the first album, adding gliding guitar octaves and a punchier sound to the legacy, with a wailing solo for good measure. On songs such as this the band seem to have a mission, but by the last third of the album, with tracks such as ‘Wavelengths’, they’ve fallen into an acoustic drudgery that barely makes you want to continue. It is lucky then that the band have another commitment in the form of abstract and obtuse lyrical use.
On Cymbals Eat Guitars’ website there is a page full of words and ramblings all rolled into one monologue under the link title "Lyrics". After reading through this without paragraphing or thematic breaks, it's evident that this concrete block of prose is every lyric to every song on both albums. It's also apparent that the band have a hive mind with a hyper-active imagination. Lyrical themes on Lenses Alien are abstract at best, at times invoking twilight '80s imagery or long drives, however lines like "in the back seat my friends point out egrets’ nests, high on the telephone poles", can sound overly contrived. The lyrics sound freeform and unrelated rhythmically to the music behind them, which without rhymes can have a tendency to make a song seem disjointed, however lines like "friends fuck each other in the guest room" is embossed on the mind during ‘Plainclothes’ and is perfectly abrasive without being jarring. D’Agostino also assumes a shared suburban experience between artist and listener, using urban myths to place you in street lamp lit streets full of drunken teenagers; "Watch out for the cars with no lights on, if you flash them they will swing around and follow you home", or rundown cinemas; "There are people who put dirty hypodermic needles between the seat cushions in the movie theater". The twisting imagery feels improvised at times, and with no conceivable structure to any of the songs it makes you wonder how D’Agostino is going to remember the words when playing them live.
Overall, the whole album feels inconsistent, even within songs, and finishes much as it began with the meandering ‘Gary Condit’, that wants you to spend time studying it but doesn’t quite deserve the attention. Cymbals Eat Guitars deserve praise for what is a well written group of songs arranged top-heavily for the album, but too often it sounds like they’ve tripped over and turned on the distortion pedal rather than actually meaning to.