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 they hype. For all the accolades, as the band bluntly told Spin, “It didn’t sell.”
And so now a band that once stumbled into an audience now finds themselves scraping for one, a cruel reversal of fortunes for a group that’s making the best music of their career. But perhaps timing could work in their favor again. The emo revival has created a home for loud, openhearted guitar rock that skirts conventional notions of “cool,” and although Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t by any means a complete match for that scene, circumstances have aligned the two. The band spent the two brief years between LOSE and their fourth album Pretty Years on the road with acts like Say Anything, Brand New, and Modern Baseball, so it may not be entirely a coincidence that Pretty Years, while holding true to its own distinctive aesthetic vision, confronts the same vital concerns that have made the best albums from emo’s modern crop resonate so deeply. Like recent works from The Hotelier and Sorority Noise, it’s about nothing less than the intrinsic value of being alive.
Some of those leaders of emo’s fourth wave have gone so far as to cast their music as a kind of support group, recording albums that double as manuals for coping with hardship. Pretty Years stops short of that. Despite the comparatively upbeat outlook of these songs—a shift that’s underscored by the album’s jaunty tempos—words of comfort don’t come naturally to singer Joseph D’Agostino. He spent much of Cymbals Eat Guitars’ grief-sick last album processing the death of a close friend, so even as he looks to better days here, he remains guarded and deeply skeptical of any good fortune. “It's as much of a declaration of love as I’ll ever muster,” he trills on “Close.” He’s trying to channel Robert Smith’s heavenly sigh, but his words don’t soar the way Smith’s do. His rasp imparts even his sweetest sentiments with a crotchety sting. “Can’t believe the shit that we were promised really might exist,” he marvels on “Have a Heart,” but it takes the song’s twinkling, Johnny Marr-esque guitars to confirm that, no, he’s not being sarcastic. He really is in love.
Every Cymbals Eat Guitars album has been dense, but none have covered as much ground as effectively as Pretty Years. With the help of producer John Congleton, who continues his remarkable streak of bringing out the best in nearly every act he works with, the band nods to some of the wilder arrangements of ’80s pop-rock records like Born in the U.S.A., Brothers in Arms, and Head on the Door. Jubilant E Street Band saxophones cut against D’Agostino’s voice on “Wish,” while the pumping “4th of July, Philadelphia (SANDY)” charges forward with the pageantry and sparkle of a lost Sandinista! gem. Pretty Years’ colorful arrangements keep the mood light even when the subject matter is anything but. On “Well,” bright Duran Duran synths soften the blow of D’Agostino’s harrowing confession: “Think I need help/Wanna get well.”
So D’Agostino still has some things to work through, even if he’s come a long way from the days of hyperventilating at the prospect of dirty hypodermic needles hidden in movie theater seat cushions. The terrible thing about anxiety, as anybody who’s ever suffered it can attest, is that there’s no permanent fix for it. It does get better over time, maybe even better than you could have hoped, yet you can never be certain that it isn’t still there, hiding dormant somewhere in your chest, waiting to throw off your heartbeat at the least expected moment. On the closer “Shrine,” D’Agostino confronts it head on, testing his progress by joining the family of his deceased friend for a meal commemorating his birthday. That prospect might have thrown him into fits just an album ago, but here things go about as well as you could hope, given the circumstances. “We laugh and drink and eat,” D’Agostino sings, “but we’re all just wishing you were here.” It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s a fitting final anecdote for an album that so movingly testifies to the difficulty of appreciating what you have while still reconciling what you’ve lost.
