As you could probably guess, we do not get paid for what we do here at Mildly Pleased. Everything we choose to write about is of our own choice, and because of that there ends up being a lot of stuff we don’t get around to writing about over the course of a year. This ends up happening especially for music, since there are so many artists out there doing worthwhile things that we just don’t have time to write about. So as has become tradition, we will once again take the final weeks of the year to look back at some of the music we didn’t get around to writing about with reviews that tend to be fairly brief and to-the-point. Which I think we’ve earned, since Mildly Pleased seemed to take more of a “quality over quantity” approach in 2014.
Cymbals Eat Guitars’ third album LOSE (yes, I’ll be capitalizing it every time) seems like an appropriate album to start things off with, since I can see why it didn’t immediately leave enough of an impression for me to wanna talk about it. At first glance, LOSE seems a bit like your typical indie rock fare, with lots of crunchy, echo-laden guitars that are accompanied by impassioned vocals and spacey atmospherics. But as late Summer turned to Fall, I found myself being drawn more and more to the earnestness and the everything-all-the-time approach we hear here. Because even though Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t exactly rewriting the indie guitar-rock handbook, the fact of the matter is, you don’t hear nearly as many albums like this anymore, and you hardly ever hear ones with this much conviction and beauty.
Also, I feel like I should pay respect to Cymbals Eat Guitars since as far as I know, they’re still the only band that has listed this site as a credible publication, as they quoted us on their own site when Sean put their debut on his Favorite Albums Of 2009 list (man, we’ve been doing this a long time). Also, they put on a hell of a show when I saw them open for Bob Mould earlier this year, so Cymbals Eat Guitars, just keep doin’ what you’re doin’.