“I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”
When Neil Young wrote this line into the original vinyl insert of Tonight’s The Night, he was three years removed from releasing the best-selling album of 1972 and watching two of his close friends die after long struggles with substance abuse. The ditchiest of Young’s infamous “Ditch Trilogy,” Tonight’s The Night was an uproarious, drunken wake filled with slurred vocals and flubbed takes, as if Young was trying to convince his departed comrades that they’d be welcome back into the land of the living for one more boot and rally.
“I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. So what could this mean to you?”
This is the chorus of “LifeNet,” the penultimate song from Cymbals Eat Guitars’ third album. When LOSE dropped — 10 years ago this Sunday — Cymbals Eat Guitars were three years removed from Lenses Alien, a knotty, inscrutable and sorely underappreciated record that killed the momentum they had accumulated with Why There Are Mountains, a minor MySpace success story at the tail of the blog rock era. Inspired by songwriter Joseph D’Agostino’s dearly departed teenage friend and former bandmate Benjamin High, LOSE was polished and propulsive, each lyric and guitar overdub fussed over for maximum impact, presumably to win back the audience that couldn’t hang for all eight and a half minutes of “Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name).”
Surely, some of the millions who owned Harvest knew of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and the Econoline-loadin’ roadie Bruce Berry; after all, “The Needle And The Damage Done” was explicitly about Whitten’s heroin addiction. People were going to buy Tonight’s The Night simply because it was the new Neil Young album. Meanwhile, High died in 2007, two years before Cymbals Eat Guitars’ debut. Unless you were in the studio with D’Agostino during the making of LOSE, you probably had never heard of Benjamin High. Still, it’s worth noting how each artist phrased the same idea. Young was purposefully swerving from the middle of the road into his own lane and could afford to care less if anyone followed him. The latter turned the last sentence into a question, actively drawing the listener into a conversation — certainly a much better approach for an artist fighting for his career.
I had hoped that D’Agostino’s efforts would be richly rewarded, that the obvious brilliance of LOSE would reposition Cymbals Eat Guitars at the vanguard of populist indie rock, rather than an opportunity to Remember Some Guys. Obviously, that did not occur. It might be the least popular album to be given the 10-year anniversary treatment in 2024. But it got the nod because, as Chris DeVille put it, “our comments section LOVES Cymbals Eat Guitars.” LOSE was just successful enough to draw attention to the dissonance between their loudest advocates and the near silence from everyone else.
While I wish Cymbals Eat Guitars weren’t primarily known for how popular they weren’t, LOSE’s failure to launch reinforces a subtext that can devastate even if you never knew Benjamin High – the chorus of “LifeNet,” and LOSE in general, expresses not just grief and mourning for people, but for music when it starts to fail you. Because eventually, it will.
And so there’s an obvious irony to LOSE — for a record that expresses such disillusion about the power of music to provide connection and meaning outside of your teenage years, it sounds like the work of indie rock’s most ardent disciple. According to All Music Guide, Cymbals Eat Guitars emerged in 2009 as “second-rate thieves…transforming all the shameless pastiche into something of a reminder of classic indie rock’s greatness,” and that’s taken from a positive review of Why There Are Mountains. D’Agostino was a literal protegee of the Wrens’ Charlie Bissell while coming up in Staten Island, and his mentor is namedropped twice on LOSE as a reminder of good times that will never return.
After the proggier Lenses Alien, Cymbals returned to their primary source material of Built To Spill and Modest Mouse, bands who at their peak made consciousness-expanding, philosophical treatises out of standard indie rock instrumentation. The first two Cymbals Eat Guitars albums worked in allusions and dense metaphor, whereas D’Agostino treated his friend’s death with clarity and recognizable New Jersey landmarks. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that LOSE is a triangulation of Good News For People Who Love Bad News and Born To Run, but not by that much. Six months earlier, the similarly Boss-indebted Lost In The Dream put the War on Drugs on a fast track to festival toplines and outdoor amphitheaters, and it wasn’t so absurd to imagine LOSE following in its footsteps.
Because, man…there are so many moments on LOSE that could’ve just killed at a 5 p.m. Coachella slot. D’Agostino yelling “COME THE FUCK ON” before the winding guitar solo in “Jackson” (the second most-cathartic FUCK of 2014, but it’s close). The knee-buckling coda of the closing “2 Hip Soul.” The lengthy freakouts at the end of “Place Names” and the soulful, crowded west epic “Laramie.” The lighter-waving finale of “Child Bride.” D’Agostino shelved the near entirety of Lenses Alien from their live sets after 2011 because the guitar parts were too difficult to play drunk, and I could imagine him flashing a shit-eating grin during the simple, palm-muted riff of “Chambers.” Instead, I saw Cymbals Eat Guitars open for Bob Mould and play to polite applause from dudes in their mid-50s.
The more I carped about this supposed injustice, the more I felt like one of those “if skills sold, truth be told…” old heads on Rap Twitter or the Elizabeth Warren proponents who yelled “she’d be electable if you voted for her” as her 2020 presidential campaign lost steam – just using the most annoying, ineffective way to make a valid point about how a supposedly democratic process can be subject to the occasional thumb on the scale. I’m just saying.
It’s certainly true that LOSE wasn’t anyone’s idea of the 2014 zeitgeist, but a quick look at various year-end lists show numerous appearances from Cloud Nothings, Parquet Courts, Protomartyr, White Lung, Ought, and Ty Segall. Rock music wasn’t that far from the center of things. Future Islands and War On Drugs – bands who were on a fairly similar timetable to Cymbals Eat Guitars – went supernova in 2014. Home, Like NoPlace Is There and Never Hungover Again were instantly hailed as classics by a small cadre of genre enthusiasts and far transcended whatever mainstream critical apathy they once faced.
After a decade of wrestling with why it just didn’t happen for LOSE, I’ve come to a conclusion that speaks to its unique emotional force but also its limitations. Though it boasts a lot of 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 recall D’Agostino joking about how the main riff from “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”) is like a curdled take on “Summer Of ‘69.” The latter is sung from the perspective of someone who gets into standard-issue young and reckless fun and sees their teenage years as a renewable resource for warm reflection; maybe the best days of their lives are behind them, but good ones still lie ahead. D’Agostino lived out his teenage dreams of indie rock semi-stardom when he was barely out of his teens. For someone who’d been a sheltered nerd for most of his life, the validation was intoxicating, but not as much as the alcohol and prescription pills. “I don’t think I knew how to handle it, emotionally or ego-wise or physically. I was always just destroying my body, getting sick on the road,” he told Billboard in 2019, and here’s how he summed up his situation at the age of 25: “Still had my family, missed them already.”
Innocence is only relative in D’Agostino’s autopsy of killed time – MySpace graves, VHS copies of Faces Of Death, expired links, dead pets, strip mall memories, seeing the Wrens in a Philly rec room. “High is just a feeling inside my eyes, got no serotonin left,” he barks on “XR,” the most distorted song on an album awash in flange and phase effects that replicate the rush of artificial neurotransmitters.
Like most teenage outcasts, High and D’Agostino bonded over music, one of the few arenas in which people that age can develop mastery or a belief in a brighter future. “XR” is the most explicit recollection of their time together and contains LOSE’s most explicit admission of defeat: “Want to wake up wanting to listen to records/ But those old feelings elude me.” There’s plenty of research on how and when people’s musical tastes start to calcify – some would say at 14, others 35. But this is something most people can recognize anecdotally; I mean, I co-host a podcast where the typical listener seems to be people who were obsessed with indie rock in college and then just flat out stopped once any of the most basic obligations of adulthood pushed back. “Those old feelings” tend to die of neglect for most people, but they elude people who actively grasp at them, people for whom music isn’t just a lifestyle, but a living.
In the ensuing years, Cymbals Eat Guitars scrambled to find their place in the greater indie rock ecosystem. A band that got Best New Music in 2009 would have never envisioned opening for Brand New five years later, but playing to large crowds enthusiastic about emotive rock music was a welcome change of pace to playing 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 was seemingly opening up for Cymbals Eat Guitars, a former buzz band being warmly embraced as emo covert ops by a less cool but infinitely more loyal audience; coincidentally, LOSE made only one major 2010s best of the decade list, at Chorus.fm, the message board formerly known as Absolute Punk.
However, for 2016’s excellent swan song Pretty Years, they moved to Philadelphia, signed to a Captured Tracks spinoff label, ditched John Agnello for John Congleton, and shoehorned in a song about hanging with Alex G. Once again, the reviews were positive, but now imbued with a newfound sense of urgency, as if they knew LOSE got short-changed: “Cymbals Eat Guitars are too good a band to need to fit into a scene”; “Pretty 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 might not be able to pull off the grit and glam of Pretty Years, but Cymbals Eat Guitars makes it look easy.” None of it stuck; I saw Cymbals Eat Guitars play to maybe a dozen people when they did their last show in San Diego, and D’Agostino guessed that most of their fans stayed home to watch the finale of Game Of Thrones.
After Cymbals Eat Guitars quietly dissolved in 2017, D’Agostino rebooted as Empty Country, signed to a thriving Tiny Engines, and booked an opening gig for an upcoming Purple Mountains tour. By the time Empty Country had finally been released on March 20, 2020, Tiny Engines had temporarily dissolved under accusations of financial impropriety, David Berman had tragically taken his own life, and we were one week into a global pandemic.
Even if this 10-year anniversary piece on LOSE calls it a masterwork numerous times over, it’s understandable that D’Agostino would prefer it be about Empty Country II instead. Not just 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 fretting or making myself sick and getting ulcers worrying about anything that would happen after the beautiful moment, which is the creation and the excitement,” he told me in a 2023 interview. “And just like making yourself cry because the thing that you did is so beautiful.”
D’Agostino still acknowledged “the hellscape of the music industry and the larger world,” how a couple of decimal points in a review or sluggish ticket sales on an off-night dictate whether or not he can continue to do that beautiful thing. Getting hung up on extra-creative concerns is not exclusive to making music, of course. I can’t tell you how many albums I’ve dismissed out of hand because someone annoying on Twitter liked it, or, oh, that’s just getting better reviews because they have cooler PR or are on a cooler label. There isn’t much I envy about my 16-year old self, except for their willingness to scrape together $18 for a CD based on nothing else besides whether or not I liked the song I heard on MTV. I was one of the many people who bought a PS5 for the sole purpose of playing EA Sports College Football 25, and I justified spending $500 on a single game because I hoped it would rekindle my LOSE-era process of letting Dynasty Mode serve as a backdrop while I spun album promos for several hours. But most of the places I used to write for back then are long gone, or I wrote about that band two years ago and can’t go back to the well or, more simply, I have a half hour a week in which to get funky.
With Empty Country’s shift towards character studies, D’Agostino will probably never end up making his version of The Meadowlands, the tell-all about living on the margins of indie rock, of “having all of the success of an entire career packed into the first thing and then kind of just existing in various, diminished forms of notoriety.” There’s a fairly substantial subgenre of albums that do exactly that, but LOSE hits at something a bit more universal, a feeling I imagine is familiar to anyone who’s spent some part of their lives defining themselves by their relationship with music; you know, people who write for places 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 every single person in either of those groups longs for a more innocent time when music was simply the beautiful thing. Those old feelings elude me, but LOSE makes me want to chase them once again.
