Cymbals Eat Guitars
LOSE
BARSUK
6/10
Twenty-five ain’t that old. But if you’re Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino, it’s the oldest you’ve ever been. On LOSE, his band’s third full-length, D’Agostino elegantly surveys the distance between his mid-twenties and his adolescence, rehashing memories whose relative youth doesn’t make them any less powerful. The topographical details aren’t pretty—friends die and relationships crumble—so it’s not surprising when he presents the future as a kind of stalled mourning: “Here’s what it felt like when I was twenty-five / Still had my family / Missed them already,” he sings on “Chambers.” Taking as many cues from Japandroids and fellow NY/NJ lifers Titus Andronicus as they do from the Wrens and Pavement, Cymbals Eat Guitars articulate emotional entropy as expertly through baroque punk (opener “Jackson”) as they do sparse folk (“Child Bride”) and blizzardy noise (“Laramie”). The result is a near-masterpiece of despair, a violent rage against time—and its own impotence.
