Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien

Last Thursday (the 17th November for you calendar fans) I woke up and I'd never heard of a band called Cymbals Eat Guitars. There's a networked folder on my laptop's desktop that is shared between me and a few of my friends which see's a steady stream of music going in and out. Yes we are straight up murdering the music business. Some of it is my bag, some not so much but I try and give it all a listen. I copied everything that had built up in there into iTunes, stuck it all on my iPod into a playlist and left for work. Due to time honored alphabet tradition, the first band to come on were Cymbals Eat Guitars. Fast forward to the following Saturday; I had listened to nothing else in the past 48 hours and after having my body melted down and glued back together by their album for the 30th time, I'd gone online and ordered it on vinyl in the middle of the night. I'm in no doubt that any album that causes obsessive behavior like that will be one I'll be listening to and enjoying for years to come.

 If I was to try and draw a very tenuous link to what I normally write about then there are small elements of post-hardcore in among the noise that Cymbals... create. But the sound It most reminds me of is noisy alt-rock-pop stuff like last LP-era At The Drive In / 1st LP-era The Mars Volta with an incredible amount of ambition and complexity in the song structures. I'm not too well versed on this whole scene, I just know this album hooked me instantly and is like nothing else I'm currently listening to.

The artwork is nice, and the dust jacket is a glossy white with the lyrics printed on it. This was put out by a label called Memphis Industries in October just gone I believe. Strangely, the best price I could see for this was from a place online called Juno Records who claim to have "The world's largest range of dance music vinyl, CD and downloads, with over 1000000 tracks available", so why they are carrying this LP I'm not too sure. Their UK Hardcore section didn't contain anything that fits my definition of that term. To their credit, I ordered this at the weekend, and it arrived first thing Monday morning. I'm not even sure how that's possible unless some Juno intern couriered it up from London to my house on his back.

There's nothing limited or particularly special about the packaging or vinyl itself, but the fact that I struggled to listen to anything else until the following Tuesday means I just had to own a copy of it.