Lenses Alien

The best thing about Lenses Alien: its incessant begging for you to spin it again.

Lenses Alien bears traces of Modest Mouse, Superchunk, Cap'n Jazz, Slint, and others, but the songs exude a craftsmanship that simple re-appropriation couldn't achieve. The band may be trying too hard to emphasize that by opening the album with an epic track, but the point isn't lost.

It is a more mature record.

The New York quartet have outdone it with Lenses Alien. [Oct 2011, p.106]

While Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records [Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica] sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.

What can I say? It's just a really f*cking good rock album.

A leaner album that manages to feel rattling and unruly, even if it's less of a surprise.

The album could have gone a bit smoother or carried a simpler, more cohesive theme, but at the end of the day, Cymbals Eat Guitars have succeeded in creating one of the year's most surprisingly transcendental sophomore albums.

Lenses Alien is a thick, abundantly ornate listen that overawes as much as it enthralls.

Despite only taking a couple of years to put out a second album, Lenses Alien also feels like an altogether more grown-up record.

All three of those bands masterfully juggle creative lyrics with equally inventive music, something Cymbals Eat Guitars comes very close to achieving on Lenses Alien.

Their second album will speak to fans of Built to Spill's squall, Superchunk's chug, and Modest Mouse's string-bending strangeness.

The balance of tension and release in Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name) is expertly managed, while Definite Darkness and The Current bring calm and a note of quiet bliss.

It may be easy to namedrop a litany of '90s bands to describe Cymbals Eat Guitars, but Lenses Alien proves that doing so is a fool's errand. This sound doesn't fit such easy spaces, which is what makes it so damn good.

Out in the suburbs, the Cymbals Eat Guitars boys had plenty of room to stretch their legs and creative muscles, but it would have done some good for them to have been reigned back in, even if a little.

As a sophomore set, Lenses Alien is daring and cohesive, layered and challenging.

At the very least, Cymbals Eat Guitars sound free from the influence-peddling of their debut, well on their way to creating their own niche. If they get there, it will be something to see.

While they mainly hit a balance between shifting symphonics, subtle keys and pyroclastic guitar, sometimes--such as on "Plainclothes," a ballad/disco/punk-funk/noise jigsaw--there's just too much going on.

What's most impressive about Lenses Alien is that Cymbals Eat Guitars, after a couple of years on the road, sound like a band now instead of a recording project. [Jul 2011, p.79]

What Cymbals Eat Guitars does best is to constantly toy with the highs and lows of song construction: soft, loud, acoustic, reverb, shout, cymbal or guitar.

Lenses Alien harnesses the singular vision of singer and guitarist Joseph D'Agostino to finely nuanced, feedback-soused art-rock. [Nov 2011, p.83]