After programming Lens AlienCymbals returned to their primary source material of Built To Spill and Modest Mouse, bands who at their peak made mind-expanding, philosophical treatises out of standard indie rock instrumentation. Cymbals Eat Guitars’ first two albums worked with allusions and dense metaphors, while D’Agostino handled his friend’s death with clarity and recognizable New Jersey landmarks. Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say that LOSE is a triangulation of Good news for people who love bad news And Born to runbut not through The Six months earlier, the company, which was also indebted to Boss, Lost in a dream to put the war on drugs on the fast track to festival toplines and outdoor amphitheaters, and it was not so absurd to imagine LOSE follow in his footsteps.
Because, man… there are so many moments on LOSE that could have been a knockout in a 5pm slot at Coachella. D’Agostino screams “COME THE FUCK ON” before the winding guitar solo in “Jackson” (the second most cathartic FUCK of 2014, but it’s close). The knee-shaking coda of the closer “2 Hip Soul”. The long freakouts at the end of “Place Names” and the soulful, overstuffed Western epic “Laramie”. The lighter-wielding finale of “Child Bride”. D’Agostino laid down almost the entire Lens Alien from their live sets after 2011 because the guitar parts were too difficult to play drunk, and I could imagine him grinning goofily during the simple palm-muted riff of “Chambers.” Instead, I saw Cymbals Eat Guitars opening for Bob Mould and getting polite applause from guys in their mid-50s.
The more I griped about this supposed injustice, the more I felt like one of those old hands on Rap Twitter who say, “If you could sell skills, to be honest…” or like the Elizabeth Warren supporters who yelled, “She’d be electable if you voted for her” as her 2020 presidential campaign lost momentum — and that was just the most annoying and ineffective way to bolster a valid argument that a supposedly democratic process can occasionally be subject to the thumb on the scale. Just saying.
It is certainly true that LOSE was not everyone’s idea of the zeitgeist of 2014, but a quick look at various year-end lists shows numerous appearances by Cloud Nothings, Parquet Courts, Protomartyr, White Lung, Ought and Ty Segall. Rock music was not The far from the center of the action. Future Islands and War On Drugs – bands with a fairly similar schedule to Cymbals Eat Guitars – had a supernova performance in 2014. At home, as if there were no place And Never hangover again were instantly hailed as classics by a small group of genre enthusiasts, far overcoming the mainstream critics’ apathy they once faced.
After a decade of wrestling with the question of why did not happen for LOSEI’ve come to a conclusion that reflects its unique emotional power, but also its limitations. While it boasts many of the things people love about Heartland-adjacent celebration rock — big hooks, unrepentant guitar solos, songs about friendships, songs about nostalgia, songs about the power of rock — it’s nostalgia where everything good has already happened. I remember D’Agostino joking that the main riff of “Chambers” might sound like Bryan Adams in isolation, fitting for a song whose chorus (“Days of the same old shit/ But I miss all of it”) sounds like a curdled version of “Summer Of ’69.” The latter is sung from the perspective of someone interested in the usual youthful and reckless fun, viewing their teenage years as a renewable source of warm reflections; perhaps the best days of their lives are behind them, but the good ones still ahead of us. D’Agostino was living out his teenage dreams of semi-stardom in indie rock when he was barely out of his teens. For someone who had been a sheltered nerd for most of his life, the validation was intoxicating, but not as much as the alcohol and prescription drugs. “I don’t think I knew how to handle it, emotionally, selfishly or physically. I was always destroying my body and getting sick on tour,” he said. Billboard in 2019, and this is how he summed up his situation at the age of 25: “I still had my family, I missed them already.”
Innocence is only relative in D’Agostino’s autopsy of dead time – MySpace graves, VHS copies of Faces of Deathexpired links, dead pets, memories of shopping malls, the Wrens seen in a lounge in Philly. “High is just a feeling in my eyes, I’m out of serotonin,” he barks on “XR,” the most distorted song on an album full of flangers and phasing effects that mimic the rush of artificial neurotransmitters.
Like most teenage misfits, High and D’Agostino bonded over music, one of the few disciplines in which people of that age can develop mastery or faith in a better future. “XR” is the clearest memory of their time together and contains LOSE‘s most pointed admission of defeat: “I want to wake up and want to listen to records/ But these old feelings are slipping away from me.” There’s plenty of research on how and when people’s musical tastes start to crust over—some would say by 14, others by 35. But that’s something most people can recognize anecdotally; I mean, I co-host a podcast where the typical listener seems to consist of people who were obsessed with indie rock in college and then just stopped listening when one of the most basic obligations of adult life got pushed back. “These old feelings” tend to die from neglect in most people, but they escape People who actively pursue it, people for whom music is not just a lifestyle but their livelihood.
In the years that followed, Cymbals Eat Guitars tried desperately to find their place in the larger indie rock ecosystem. A band that won Best New Music in 2009 could never have imagined opening for Brand New five years later, but playing to a large crowd that was into emotional rock music was a welcome change from half-empty shows in clubs. This led to the Jesse Lacey-produced single “Aerobed,” and a few months later they joined a tour headlined by Say Anything and Modern Baseball. A la Los Campesinos!, a path seemed to open for Cymbals Eat Guitars, a former hip band that was warmly welcomed by a less cool but infinitely more loyal audience than emo secret agents; coincidentally LOSE made it onto just one major best-of-the-decade list, in 2010, on Chorus.fm, the message board formerly known as Absolute Punk.
But for the great swan song of 2016 Beautiful yearsthey moved to Philadelphia, signed to a Captured Tracks offshoot label, dropped John Agnello for John Congleton, and squeezed in a song about hanging out with Alex G. Once again, the reviews were positive, but now imbued with a newfound sense of urgency, as if they knew LOSE came up short: “Cymbals Eat Guitars are too good a band to have to fit into a scene”; “Beautiful years is one of the best guitar albums of the year, one of the most inventive, adventurous and best rock records of 2016″; “Springsteen himself may not be able to capture the determination and glamour of Beautiful yearsbut Cymbals Eat Guitars makes it look easy.” None of this stuck; I saw Cymbals Eat Guitars play at their last show in San Diego in front of maybe a dozen people, and D’Agostino suspected that most of their fans had stayed home to watch the finale of Game of Thrones.
After Cymbals Eat Guitars quietly disbanded in 2017, D’Agostino relaunched as Empty Country, signed with the thriving Tiny Engines and booked an opening gig for an upcoming Purple Mountains tour. Empty land had finally been released on March 20, 2020, Tiny Engines had temporarily disbanded due to allegations of financial irregularities, David Berman had tragically taken his own life, and we were a week into a global pandemic.
Even though this 10-year anniversary piece is LOSE calls it a masterpiece several times, it is understandable that D’Agostino would prefer it to be over Empty Land II instead. Not only because LOSE was always about the futility of living in the past, or even just because D’Agostino believes his most recent work is also his best. “It’s more fun than it ever was when I was worried or made myself sick and got stomach ulcers worrying about what would happen after the beautiful moment, which was the creation and the excitement,” he told me in an interview in 2023. “And it’s like making yourself cry because what you’ve done is so beautiful.”
D’Agostino was still aware of the “hellscape of the music industry and the world in general,” and a few decimal points in a review or sluggish ticket sales on a bad night determine whether or not he can keep doing this wonderful thing. Obsessing overly creative things isn’t unique to making music, of course. I can’t tell you how many albums I’ve rejected out of hand because someone on Twitter liked them, or oh, that’s just because they get better reviews because they have cooler PR or are on a cooler label. I don’t envy my 16-year-old self much, except for his willingness to scrape together $18 for a CD just because I liked or didn’t like the song I heard on MTV. I was one of the many people who bought a PS5 just to play. EA Sports Football 25and I justified spending $500 on a single game because I hoped it would LOSE-era process where I would have Dynasty Mode playing as background music while I DJed album promos for several hours. But most of the places I wrote for back then are long gone, or I wrote about that band two years ago and can’t go back to the source, or more simply, I have half an hour a week to make funk.
Since Empty Country focuses more on character studies, D’Agostino will be making his version of The meadowsthe revelation about life on the fringes of indie rock, about “packing all the success of an entire career into the first thing and then somehow only existing in various, diminished forms of notoriety.” There’s a pretty large subgenre of albums that do just that, but LOSE hits on something more universal, a feeling that I imagine is familiar to anyone who has spent part of their life defining themselves through their relationship to music; you know, people who write for sites like Stereogum and people who hang out in the comments section of Stereogum. While making music or writing about music or simply obsessing over it as a fan can deepen one’s appreciation of the art, I imagine that every single person in any of these groups longs for a more innocent time when music was simply the beautiful thing. These old feelings are slipping away from me, but LOSE makes me want to chase them again.
