Much of what hits you during a Cymbals Eat Guitars song is a sense that time passes in a disorderly manner. It bails or it lingers. It gives or it takes and it causes some great tumult. Sometimes that unruliness makes for interesting inconsistencies and forces a person's composition to alter. A mind tends to be programmed to accept when time passes itself off without much of an aftertaste, the draw of it being that it's hardly noticeable. It was there and it was gone. It only seemed to fly away because there was nothing tugging at the sleeves, demanding attention, damaging a focused flow and view.
The band from Staten Island, New York, detail nights of body shots and days of persistent beatings, giving them all something of a reclining bent. They don't feel all that harried most of the time. There are moments where they nip and they bite, but even when the teeth come out and they get a little snarly, it's only for a second and then things have settled back in and all is just passing again.
Lead singer Joseph D'Agostino writes in sunsets and silhouettes, offering up these notions of frustration and disappointment, as if they were happening by the ocean's side. There is that dull roar and that cool slamming of people smacking the ground and the ground smacking them right back, continually battling. It comes out in these songs that are heavy on unfulfilled promises and an inability to know what anyone's supposed to do about the boredom, when it sets in. Written into their breaths is a deafening deference to whatever is going to happen. D'Agostino sings, "And I feel so at peace/As infinite Earth versions," giving us the perspective needed to understand how we're passing.