There isn't much undiscovered land left on earth. While most authorities have dubbed space the final frontier, there's a serious divide—both geographically and personally—between people in living rooms and gaudy NASA equipment light-years away. Although our future relatives might own real estate on the moon, for our sake we're likely confusing literary and scientific fodder for legitimate expansion. And if you take only one lesson away from indie rock's most ambitious debut, Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why There Are Mountains, it's that. Although we're indefinitely stuck on this increasingly crusty rock, we're wasting our resources if we fail to revisit and re-evaluate the forest behind the trees.
Why There Are Mountains might be the most unlikely success of the year. A group of east-coast college kids recording an album that sounds like everything we've already heard, Cymbals don't cover much new ground, but they put a magnifying glass to the peaks and valleys of the western world's rural sprawl. They're more Sal Paradise than Hernán Cortés, though. They don't waste time turning over rocks in search of uncovered gems; they scale mountains and ford rivers, all the while daring us to keep pace. Simultaneously cathartic and invigorating, the songs embody both a liberating freedom and a solitary reprieve the way a car acts as a cozy vessel for the breathtakingly novel awes in exploration. They use tracks like ""Cold Spring,"" ""Wind Phoenix"" and ""Like Blood Does"" as brushstrokes of displacement and remorse to paint a majestic portrait of clarity and freedom.
From his piercing wails to his trudging whimpers, lead singer/guitarist Joe Ferocious wears his heart on his sleeve and evokes devastatingly pervasive emotions in their most gristly, pure form. From the riotous, crashing ""...And the Hazy Sea"" to the pleasant, swaying melody of ""Indiana,"" Cymbals conjure sprawling grandeur and eloquence in an impossibly tight package.
Ruthlessly meticulous, Mountains' most impressive strength is its depth and cohesiveness. However powerfully each song stands on its own, they're at their best when entrenched in the album's strong inner context. We can only hope that, by the time we're all crotchety old geezers, Why There Are Mountains is the record high-schoolers will aspire to in their garages.
The past year saw the biggest influx of ill-advised Pavement rip-offs and gratuitous hipster nut-flexes in history. Once a fruitful reservoir for uninhibited creativity and progress, indie music has shown its first major wave of saturation and contentedness, and Cymbals Eat Guitars gives it its biggest gut-check yet. Mountains doesn't break any new ground, but their disregard for conventions creates an expansiveness and depth unparalleled this year. We never needed to reinvent the keyboard, we just had to dig deeper into our fretboards. And while most have their heads in the clouds looking skyward, Cymbals Eat Guitars brought the rest of us back down to earth and spoon-fed us a profoundly realized introduction.
