Cymbals Eat Guitars: "Warning"

If you’ve never seen Cymbals Eat Guitars play Lenses Alien live, you might be shit out of luck. The Staten Island band performed not a single song from their excellent 2011 LP while debuting new material on the road this past fall. “It was work playing material from Lenses Alien live,” frontman Joseph D’Agostino explained. “If you had even a couple drinks before the show, there was no way you were gonna nail everything.” But judging from the singles Shaolin’s finest have let go from their upcoming third record LOSE, their only mistake was forgetting to have fun.

Even more so than “Jackson” and “Chambers”, “Warning” maintains every development from last time out and gets rid of the unnecessary complexities that might cause an audience to check out. Essentially a rocket-fueled redux of “Shore Points”, you get the same tricky guitar riffs and hyper-detailed lyrics—”You’re lookin’ mighty ghostly just like Bowie on ‘Soul Train’,” D’Agostino sings. But this time, it’s within an instantly knowable song structure where the chorus actually repeats; they hit the crescendo at the end, resulting in quintessential indie rock that’s quickly identifiable as Cymbals Eat Guitars. After years of cleverly taking from the indie rock canon, “Warning” is Cymbals Eat Guitars’ gift back.

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