Cymbals Eat Guitars

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Cymbals Eat Guitars

Cymbals Eat Guitars

This Staten Island quartet breathes life into indie rock with songs as personal as they are ambitious. This New York City band only lasted from 2007-2017 but they gave us some great music in that one decade. 2009’s Why There Are Mountains, 2011’s Lenses Alien, personal favorite 2014’s LOSE, and 2016’s Pretty Years. Founded in 2007, the band comprised of Joseph D'Agostino (aka Joseph Ferocious; vocals, guitars), Matt Cohen (guitar), Neil Berenholz (bass), Matthew Miller (drums), and Daniel Baer (keyboards). D'Agostino, the band's chief songwriter, first began playing with Miller in high school. Starting in the tenth grade, the two performed covers of songs from the first two Weezer albums; by the end of their senior year they'd begun performing original material and recorded a demo titled Joseph Ferocious. As a college student, D'Agostino worked toward forming a full band. He placed an ad on craigslist and steadily assembled a full-band lineup that was christened Cymbals Eat Guitars (from a Lou Reed quote describing the sound of the Velvet Underground) upon its formation. An early live performance drew the attention of Kyle "Slick" Johnson, who had previously engineered mainstream indie rock albums like We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse. Impressed by the band's live performance, Johnson contacted the band members and offered to produce their songs. Cymbals Eat Guitars made their recording debut in 2008 on an indie compilation with the song "Share."  Cymbals Eat Guitars’ 2009 debut album Why There Are Mountains arrived at the very tail end of indie-rock’s halcyon days when it was still possible for a new band to earn a fast following just by doing the whole Built to Spill/Modest Mouse/Pixies thing well. That’s not to say they didn’t deserve their success. They were always more than the sum of their influences, considerably craftier and less predictable than most of the era’s ’90s enthusiasts. But as the public’s appetite for meat-and-potatoes indie rock waned, the band found that their fast rise didn’t buy them much loyalty. The group’s prickly yet exhilarating 2011 follow-up Lenses Alien demanded more from listeners than most were willing to give, and although their more immediate, emotional knockout punch of a third record LOSE seemed like a prime candidate for a second breakthrough, its reach didn’t live up to the hype. For all the accolades, as the band bluntly told Spin, “It didn’t sell.” You can't miss the rockin' "Warning" though. In 2011, the band signed on with Barsuk Records and went into the studio with John Agnello to record its second album, Lenses Alien, which was released in the summer of that year. It would be three years before the band returned with third album LOSE in 2014. It featured a new drummer, Andrew Dole. With the departure of CohenTcy soon after, D'Agostino was the sole remaining original bandmember for 2016's Pretty Years, which was recorded with yet another high-profile indie producer, John Congleton (St. Vincent, Explosions in the Sky).

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Cymbals Eat Guitars