Cymbals Eat Guitars

A conversation with Matthew Whipple

(April 2010)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Since making waves with their debut album last year, young NY indie-rockers Cymbals Eat Guitars have pounded a lot of pavement and presumably left a lot of ears ringing. Drawing comparisons to yesteryear heroes like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill (yes, I know they're both still around), and picked as a sure bet to join the ranks of the "indie famous" by no less an authority on indie famous than Charles Bissell of The Wrens, CEG has lately been spending time alongside Freelance Whales (enjoying a blizzard of buzz of their own following SXSW) and Bear In Heaven.

Bassist Matthew Whipple checked in from the road to talk about women's golf, conversations with cats, awesome rock names, surprise songs pumping on his band's van speakers and how all the touring may impact their upcoming sophomore album.

What's life like on the road with Freelance Whales and Bear In Heaven?  Who are the troublemakers?

We’ve been on the road with Bear in Heaven and Freelance Whales for almost a month now.  We have gotten to be chummy with everybody, but we wish we had more time to spend together.  We’re not exactly all caravanning from place to play together so it’s really only a few hours spent together each day. We had a chance to all hang for a bit when we thought we were going to be stuck in Laramie, WY because the roads to Denver were all closed.  We drank at a bar by the train tracks and watched an LPGA tournament.  I’m not sure who the troublemakers are, which I guess means it very well could be us. 

After this tour wraps, is it time for a break or time to crack into the second album? 

After this tour wraps, we’ve got about a week off at home and then we’re heading out again to do some dates with Los Campesinos!, which we’re really excited about.  Whenever we have time off from touring we try to get together and work on new songs, so the next few months will pretty much be alternating touring and writing at home.  It takes us a while to put a song together so we need to take every chance we get to try to make progress on new material. 

You’re obviously a young band, but you’ve already logged a lot of shows in support of your debut.  Not much about being a touring band is “normal,” but has it sunk in and started to feel… normal yet? 

I think it feels as normal as it possibly can.  This current tour is the longest we have ever done, so I supposed there will be a weird few days of adjustment when we get home.  It’s weird to get home and have so much less activity right away.  A day or two of sweatpants and talking to the cat and we’ll all be right as rain and ready to do it again. 

Some of Why There Are Mountains dates back to high school, and it was put together before CEG had become a mean, lean touring machine.  Does that mean that the second album is going to sound quite a bit different – or not necessarily?

I think the second album will sound like us, but in a lot of ways that probably means it will sound quite different from WTAM.  That record was really Joe and Matt’s studio project, and for our next record, it will be the band that is “the band” making the record.  It will have unique contributions from everybody.  Four out of our five newest songs are also regular parts of our live sets, so the second record will inevitably sound more like we sound as a live band.

One of the buzz things that got me to sit up and pay attention to you guys was when Charles Bissell put his seal of approval on the album.  If you could play kingmaker and propel another band to the heights of the blogosphere, who are you especially hyped about right now? 

We met these kids in Seattle at our in store at Sonic Boom Records.  They’re a band called Kids and Animals.   They were telling us all about the Seattle house show scene and gave us their CD.  We didn’t really know what to expect but it has some really good songs on it and some really cool early Modest Mouse sounding guitar work.  They were really nice dudes but couldn’t get into our show at the Crocodile because it was 21+. 

You guys recently put out the “Wind Phoenix” single.  What inspired the decision to re-record that one?

Our UK label wanted to give radio another shot and asked us for a song for a 7” that was radio length to try to get into rotation on BBC 6 Music.  It was up to us to choose the song and "Wind Phoenix" seemed pretty obvious as a single.  The only problem was that "Wind Phoenix" is over five minutes long, so rather than chopping it up on a computer and having it potentially sound weird, we went into the studio and recorded a version of the song that chopped all the instrumental breaks so it would sound more natural.  I suppose the irony there is that the resulting track still sounds super weird to us. 

The B-side is the Elliott Smith cover, which seems to have surprised some fans and bloggers who must expect that you only have ‘90s indie-rock heroes on your iPods.  If we put your music collection on shuffle, what would be some other potential surprises?

I think there would be a lot, actually.  We do listen to a considerable amount of  the 90’s indie classics, but in addition to all that we listen to a lot of shoegaze and classic rock and current indie music.  Over the past few days in the van we have listened to Bowie, Harvey Milk, The Breeders,  the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band,  Beach House, Stereolab, Neil Young, and Nas.  Surprised? 

Joseph Ferocious is a great rock-and-roll name.  How come the other guys didn’t try their luck at that?

We have some inter-band nicknames amongst ourselves that I won’t go into.  No one really calls Joe Joseph Ferocious but it is pretty apt as far as stage names go.  There was a Spanish blog that translated my name as “Gospels Whipple” and I am strongly considering adopting it.