- Photo by Josh Goleman
Brooklyn born Cymbals Eat Guitars take their name from something Lou Reed once said about The Velvet Underground. Yet, it wasn’t an overly whimsical metaphor like “my band sounds like cymbals eating guitars,” but instead something more musically technical. Reed was asked why the drummer, Moe Trucker, didn’t crash down on the cymbals a lot on their records. Reed responded that it was because the noise of cymbals eats, or drowns out, the guitar and he was apparently concerned about a purer tone from the instrument.
When explained like this, it sort of drains all the magic out of what a listener imagines when the phrase is plucked out of context. Like a swarm of floating cymbals, roving around a trashed underground nightclub savannah in search of it's prey. A centrifugal hum reverberates around the metal of the crash cymbal pack leaders as the muted high-hats let out a few taunting chatters. A guitar is spotted through the reeds of the tall amplifiers and a vicious, bloody onslaught ensues on the concealed pack of instruments. The cymbals mercilessly shred through fret boards and splinter hollow bodies easily. The stage becomes an out of focus mess of flying scraps of wood and metal. As the violence reaches its end, pick-ups are tossed into the air and swallowed whole into invisible stomachs and guitar strings are used to floss the remaining flecks of flesh from their teeth. Lou Reed might not have used the phrase to describe his band, but as for Cymbals Eat Guitars, the image represents their music pretty well.
There are more concrete ways to describe the band’s sound. Some bands wait until the end of one of their songs on a record to play with guitar effects and feedback to produce a random musical experiment for about thirty seconds. Maybe it’s at the very end of a show when they’re smashing their guitars on stage and they just go nuts, shouting and playing whatever. Well, for Cymbals Eat Guitars, those moments are present all throughout their music and are joined together by catchy hooks, sleazy keyboards and straightforward rock.
