Cigarettes After Sex - Cry: A Collection of Ruminations on Love
4 stars
With their second album, Cigarettes After Sex are back with more noir dream-pop, echoey guitars, and amazing vocals. Greg Gonzalez sounds deep in love, as he whispers the lyrics, slow-as-molasses, in songs like “Pure” & “Touch”. His penchant for lovely, lilting melodies, and the sound, with the loud bass and interlocking guitar lines, give a rich texture to the nine tracks, which progressively cascade into different stages of a relationship, similar to mini-narratives, about random sexual encounters and misadventures.
Songs like the dusky “Heavenly” or the elegant “Falling in Love” are hypnotic, but the hooks are splendid examples of songwriting. The former opens with a sound that carries a slight amount of urgency in it, accompanied by the bass and the vocals that work off of each other gorgeously before waves of guitar punctuate the softness of the chorus (“Because this is where I want to be/Where it’s so sweet and heavenly”). Although the humour that was present in the earlier album has been replaced by a deeper sincerity, even the song, “Hentai”, the Japanese anime form of pornography, feels like a contemplation on love, with Gonzalez crooning the words “Beautiful hearts are in your eyes”, and makes you wonder if it’s meant for someone or something.
Sonically, the new album sounds like an impressive collection. It’s quite easy to write a bunch of slow songs with similar chords, but the band is immensely talented and their work has a certain truth and sadness that helps them create a record that feels as smooth as silk and moves in a way that is similar to a well-directed movie, and even though some critics say that every song sounds the same, it’s their similarities that become their strengths, gradually setting a hazy, unshakable mood. “All the blatantly audible influences become irrelevant, leaving Cigarettes After Sex with a sound of its own, created with scant tools and seemingly minimal effort. Like the best sleight of hand magicians, the trick’s conjured before you, then gone.”, one of the critics claimed.
Where most indie and pop bands often overshadow their lead vocalist in echo, reducing them to just another component within the wistful drift of sound, Gonzalez is the centre of attention here. Cigarettes After Sex’s sound is the trademark loud bass and interlocking guitar lines, which are very clearly defined – but there’s no doubt that the focus is Gonzalez and the lyrics. The album washes you over with a drowsy haze, the kind of feeling you get when you stay up all night, talking to someone, and the words fill your heart with a certain longing, and through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cry becomes one of those restrained albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.
