Sounds like The Lonesome Crowded West… check. LOUDquietLOUD dynamics… check. Hell, chuck in some lazy Pavement comparisons too. And that is Cymbals Eat Guitars.

So goes almost every review of the debut album by the New York-based quartet. And yes, they do sound like the records Modest Mouse used to make. They do play music that suddenly veers from squalls of feedback to fingerpicked acoustic guitar. For fucks sake, the barely coherent mumbled vocals of lead singer Joseph Ferocious even sound like Stephen Malkmus.

Much more important than any of this, though, is the fact that Cymbals Eat Guitars have created, in Why There Are Mountains, an almost perfect record, and one of the best debut albums I have heard in a very long time.

Album opener …And the Hazy Sea is a mission statement of sorts, kicking off with a chorus of woah-aahs and coming to a close six minutes later with squalls of feedback. In between Cymbals Eat Guitars create an overwhelming ocean of noise with semi-audible vocals that speak of “business men in starched collar shirts who peered out windows that would fog faster than you could wipe them.”

Some Trees (Merritt Moon) seems to consist of about five different song parts crammed into less than 3 minutes, while album centrepiece Share builds from a single organ line to raucous white noise. Wind Pheonix, recently released as a single, sees the band expanding their palate with glockenspiel and horns, while Ferocious engages in Beck-style word play, singing about “Exotic vision permanently red-light squinting for hours natural American spirit doctorate make love to inanimate objects pasteboard decked out in Ikea finery.”

When the album reaches an end on Like Blood Does, with only a single acoustic guitar and Joseph Ferocious’ cracking voice, it’s hard to think of any other album released of late that has sounded so coherent, and so meaningful. It may only be March, but this album is already a contender to be the best of the year.

9.8790/10

Jed Howlett

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Wind Phoenix